Riding in on a Pale Horse
by The Quiller
Summary: The Arcs are a proud line of warriors. Jaune, however, inherited none of that talent. When his father takes him to a job fair to find a more suitable apprenticeship, no one picks him. No one, that is, save for a black robed figure who rides in on a pale horse. Turns out the legends got quite a lot wrong, and at least one god still calls Remnant home. [minor Discworld crossover]
1. Chapter 01

**AUTHOR'S NOTE** : (12/9/2017) There's a bit of a revamp since I decided to go back and flesh out Jaune's four years of apprenticeship, as well as tweak a few details that I realized would cause plotholes further down the line. This means that the previously posted chapters will be pushed back to make room for the new content, and several edits to previously posted chapters have been made. Thus, there's still one more missing chapter that needs to be written between the current update, Chapter 4, and the old chapter 6. Sorry for any confusion.

. . .

 ** _Chapter One_**

 _In Which Being Gainfully Employed Is Bad For Your Life Expectancy_

. . .

The Arcs had produced huntsmen and huntresses of superior quality for generations. Stalwart, loyal, and indomitable, they stepped onto the battlefields like heroes and heroines of yore, brandishing the golden sigil of their house to inspire hope in the hearts of their allies and terror in the hearts of their enemies.

So it was acutely embarrassing to the Arc family that their youngest son had about the same amount of talent for combat that you might find in a petrified cockroach. It wasn't that he didn't try his best, but he had an oblivious, clumsy way of trying that everyone around him soon learned to dread. There was something about it that inevitably ended up hazardous to not only his own health, but also counterproductive to whatever aim he was trying to achieve. He was the kind of boy who might leap out of a tree to catch a falling maiden, then realize in midair that neither of them had a landing strategy. His heart was in the right place; it was his body that failed to follow suit.

Said body was currently hurtling across the back yard towards a straw dummy, flailing and screaming the entire way.

For a brief moment, his charge actually looked promising - he had raised his wooden practice sword high over his head, his expression was, well, not exactly fierce, but certainly enthusiastic, and he had enough speed to actually do some damage.

He promptly stepped on his own loose shoelace and had a magnificent tumble, arse over teakettle, that planted him facedown into the dirt. He skidded until he was about half a foot short of the straw dummy. As if to add insult to injury, the practice sword that had gone flying into the air when he fell came down with perfect precision to clonk him right in noggin as he attempted to get back up.

Through the window of their home, his father applied his face to his palm for the umpteenth time while his mother cringed sympathetically. Even the straw dummy seemed to look down at the fallen boy with pity on its blank straw face.

"He's going to get himself killed," his father said somberly. "Won't even be a Grimm. It'll be something humiliating like tripping over a rock or swallowing a poisonous bug."

"Perhaps if we unlocked his aura...?" His mother trailed off with a sort of resigned hopelessness that made it rather clear she didn't think it would solve anything at all.

"With no skill to back it up? Might as well just dump some syrup on him and serve him to the beasts on a platter. It'd be faster and less painful," his father growled. He shook his head and continued, "No, I'll take him into town for the hiring fair. With all the craftsman that'll be attending, I'm sure at least one will be willing to take him on as an apprentice."

"It'll break his heart. He had it set on becoming huntsman like you," said his mother.

His father heaved another heavy sigh and said, "I know. But I'd rather he be alive to regret it than too dead to care."

Then the man pushed open the window and hollered across the yard, "Jaune!"

The boy flinched at the sound of his name and fumbled the practice sword that he had just picked up. The tips of his ears were red with embarrassment as he jogged over with the realization that his parents had seen the entire kerfuffle with the dummy.

"Get inside and clean yourself up," his father barked, "You'll need to be presentable when we go into town."

Jaune awkwardly tried to brush some dirt out of his hair as he asked, "Why're we going into town?"

"To find you a proper trade," his father answered.

Jaune's eyes widened. He opened his mouth to protest, but his father cut him off, "You're already thirteen. Any older and there won't be anyone willing to take you on. You don't want to end up as a worthless layabout, do you?"

The boy hung his head in shame.

"...no," he answered glumly.

His father clapped him on the shoulder and said, "Then no more griping, and get changed. Unless you're aspiring to become a swine keeper, all that dirt's gonna give people the wrong impression."

. . .

As it turned out, Jaune was not in danger of being apprenticed to a swine keeper. He was, in fact, in greater danger of not being apprenticed at all.

The fact of the matter was that Jaune was uniquely ill-suited to the task of standing in line and waiting to be picked. The nervous fidgeting combined with the desperate urge to flee resulted in the unfortunate overall impression of a woodland critter who was about to throw all caution to the wind and toss itself snout-first into a much larger predator. As this was not a particularly desirable quality in anything except hunting bait, Jaune consistently remained the last person to be chosen whenever there was any sort of choosing to be done.

Granted, professional tradesmen generally looked for a wider array of qualities than children choosing teams at recess, but Jaune seemed just as deficient in those additional qualities, because he still found himself standing awkwardly in the middle of the town square even as all the other kids were plucked from the line like the least offensive piece fruit from a grocer's cart.

It wasn't that Jaune even particularly wanted to be chosen; he didn't want to be a tinkerer, or a cooper, or a travelling shoe shiner. It was just that the kids who turned up at these fairs were already from the bottom of the barrel - the ones that had either failed to get into combat school or had been deemed too incompetent to entrust with the family business. Since the Arc family business was combat, Jaune had the ignominious prestige of fulfilling both conditions in one fell swoop.

"Dad, let's just go home," he sighed as the street sweeper who had started cleaning up the fairgrounds gave them a pitying look. No offer of apprenticeship though. Even street sweepers had higher standards, it seemed. "I can always just...become a farmer or something." ' _Like a huntsman,'_ he thought, but didn't dare voice aloud.

"Fair's not over until midnight," his father rebuffed him. There was a steely glint in his father's eyes that made Jaune shut up without further protest.

The young Arc scion glanced up at the sky and shivered. The shattered moon above was almost completely obscured by clouds, and there was an ominous rumble far off in the distance that promised rain. His father seemed immune to the brisk cold settling in, but Jaune had to clench his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering. He wondered if he would every become anything like his father. If his father was a towering tree, then Jaune was an acorn that had not just fallen far from the tree, but had also rolled off the edge of a cliff, into a river, which then swept it out to sea.

A sharp gust of cold wind whistled through the fairgrounds. A stray tumbleweed rolled through town square. By this point, it was quite clear that no one else was coming, and Jaune felt both ashamed and just a tiny bit relieved.

The clock tower tolled for midnight. It tolled once, twice, thrice - eleven times total, but then it stopped. Everything stopped. The twelfth toll never came. In fact, the entire town seemed to fall completely silent, save for a sudden 'clip-clop-clip-clop' of staccato hooves on hard paving stones that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at all.

Jaune squinted through the gloom until the blurry white shape resolved itself into a horse. A rather lovely horse, in fact, with a pale white coat and a shimmering mane that trailed in the breeze even when there wasn't any breeze to be had. She was the sort of mare you might expect a prince charming to ride in on during the climatic scene of a children's fairytale.

The rider, however, was about as far away from charming as you could get without being an eldritch abomination. Or at least, an obvious one, since there was something distinctly eldritch about the rider even if it seemed to be making a token effort to appear humanoid. Said eldritch being was probably not a prince either, unless the fashions of the defunct nobility had changed drastically since the last time Jaune had the misfortune of reading a celebrity tabloid. The rider was swathed from head to toe in a black - well - Jaune hesitated to call it a cloak, because it seemed more like a patchwork of black fabric that a Beowulf had chewed up and spat back out. The rider glanced around the empty square for a moment before looking straight at Jaune.

Jaune found himself looking straight into orbs of cold blue fire hidden in the depths of the rider's cowl. He also noticed the alabaster fingers curled around the reins and the oversized scythe strapped to the rider's back. It was obvious that the rider was no prince charming, but then, prince charming was not the only fairytale who came riding in on a pale horse.

The rider finally spoke in a voice that sounded like a slab of marble being dropped over a tomb. Jaune didn't hear the words so much as they was suddenly there, grinding against the inside of his skull like a bad migraine.

GREETINGS. MY ARRIVAL IS SUITABLY LATE, I HOPE. I WAS TOLD THAT THIS IS THE FASHIONABLE THING TO DO.

Jaune felt a bone deep chill that had nothing to do with the temperature whatsoever. The rider dismounted and stalked towards him in a way that suggested any attempt to flee would be ill-advised. Even more worryingly, his father, who would usually have reacted to such a threatening figure with liberal amounts of violence by now, was completely frozen in place. Everything was completely frozen in place. Everything, that is, except Jaune.

In a very calm voice that only cracked because of puberty and certainly not because of existential dread, Jaune said, "You're Death, aren't you?"

WELL SPOTTED. I SEE MY REPUTATION PRECEDES ME.

Jaune swallowed what felt like a lead block that had suddenly gotten crammed in his throat. His voice frustratingly remained an entire octave higher than normal as he asked, "Didn't...all the gods abandon Remnant after they finished making everything?"

Death made an annoyed-sounding 'click'.

ONLY THOSE TWO IRRESPONSIBLE BROTHERS. SOMEONE HAD TO CLEAN UP THEIR MESS. IF THEY HADN'T MEDDLED, THERE WOULD NOT BE ALL THESE 'HUNTSMEN' TYPES WHO NEVER SEEM TO DIE WHEN THEY'RE SCHEDULED TO.

Feeling incredibly alarmed on his father's behalf, Jaune sidled as nonthreateningly as he could between his father and Death, painfully aware that his weedy five-foot-zilch did basically nothing to shield his father's towering six-foot-eight.

"W-well, my father doesn't kill anything unless he really has to. He's also a very good man who really deserves to live a long time. There are a lot of people who still need him, you see. So, I would very much appreciate it if you left him alone." Jaune found the hairs on his neck rising in concert with the pitch of his voice. The last few words came out so high that they were nearly inaudible to the human ear.

Then there was a terrifying rattling sound that Jaune belatedly realized was the sound of Death laughing.

I AM NOT HERE FOR HIM. I AM HERE FOR YOU.

"Oh," said Jaune, his voice coming back down to a normal pitch, much like a deflating balloon. He wasn't sure how he ought to react to being told so bluntly. He wondered briefly what had killed him, because there didn't seem to be anything particularly dangerous in the immediate vicinity (because describing Death as dangerous was a bit like describing water as damp), and prior experience indicated that you couldn't actually die of embarrassment.

But then, he was hardly in a position to argue details with the grim reaper literally bearing down on him, so Jaune swallowed the lump in his throat and asked in a very small voice, "Can I at least say goodbye?"

YOU MISUNDERSTAND, Death said. I WAS TOLD BY A COLLEAGUE THAT THIS IS THE MOST FOOLPROOF WAY TO ACQUIRE AN APPRENTICE.

Jaune's previous train of thought ground to a screeching halt. It took a few tries before he could get a new one started.

"An...apprentice?" Death nodded. "Don't they, uh, need to be, you know?" Jaune drew a finger across his neck and made a gurgling noise.

BEING DEAD IS NOT A JOB REQUIREMENT.

"Huh. Okay." Jaune's heart sank. He wasn't sure what else he could say. He really didn't want to be any sort of apprentice, and even if he had to pick one, an apprentice Grim Reaper was pretty much at the very bottom of the list. It was about as far from being a hero as you could get. He wished he was brave enough to flatly refuse, but he had a feeling that Death didn't exactly take ' _no_ ' for an answer. There were a few moments of awkward silence before Jaune spoke up again, saying, "I'm, uh, not exactly cut out for killing people. There's probably someone a lot more qualified."

DON'T BE DAFT. PEOPLE GET KILLED ALL ON THEIR OWN. I SIMPLY COLLECT THEM AFTER THE FACT. IMAGINE THE MESS IT WOULD CAUSE IF PEOPLE DID NOT DIE WHEN THEY ARE KILLED.

Well, that certainly wasn't wrong, even if it didn't sound quite right.

Jaune said lamely, "Are you sure there isn't anyone better suited?"

Death shrugged. PAST EVIDENCE INDICATES THAT AWKWARD YOUTHS WITH NO APPARENT PURPOSE IN LIFE MAKE THE BEST APPRENTICES. CONGRATULATIONS. YOU ARE THE MOST AWKWARD AND PURPOSELESS YOUTH I COULD FIND. I'M SURE YOUR ABSENCE WILL MAKE NO DIFFERENCE IN THE GREATER SCOPE OF THE TIME-SPACE CONTINUUM.

' _Well, if Death itself says that I'll never amount to anything, that's kinda the final nail in the coffin, isn't it?_ ' Jaune thought hollowly to himself. It was better than wasting his entire life chasing a dream that would never come true, but not by much. Given that the alternative was apprenticing himself to personification of the Worst Case Scenario, wasting his life sounded like a surprisingly attractive choice. Unfortunately, turning down Death's offer of apprenticeship face to face sounded like a Very Bad Idea - capital letters and all.

Feeling a little sorry for himself, Jaune hedged, "Then can you undo whatever you did to my dad? I'm still a minor, so he's the one who has to agree to it." If anyone could say no to Death, it would be his father.

OF COURSE. IT'S NOT LIKE I CAN KEEP TIME OUT FOREVER ANYWAY. Death paused, then amended, OR RATHER, I COULD, BUT IT WOULD BE TERRIBLY RUDE.

Death snapped its fingers, and an odd purplish light seemed to wash over reality, followed by what could only be described as a 'pop' before the long delayed twelfth toll of the courthouse bell finally rolled through the town square.

Jaune's father seemed to unfreeze gradually, his eyes glossy and disoriented for a moment before he stumbled backwards, suddenly confronted by someone who clearly hadn't been there the moment before. He blinked a few more times before his gaze seemed to focus on an indeterminate point behind the figure.

"Sorry, didn't see you for a moment there. Mind must've wandered," his father said, apparently seeing nothing wrong with a cloaked figure with fire for eyes and a massive scythe strapped across its back.

NO HARM DONE. I WAS ABOUT TO MAKE YOUR BOY AN OFFER OF EMPLOYMENT.

His father's demeanor immediately changed, his expression becoming much more engaged. "Is that so? What was your profession again?"

I USHER SOULS INTO THE NEXT WORLD, said Death.

"Ah, should have guessed, from your outfit," his father said with a nod before turning to Jaune, "What do you think, son? Think you can hack it as an undertaker? It might not be the most glamorous of jobs, but it's still very respectable and necessary work."

"I don't think -" Jaune began, but never got a chance to finish.

"He'll do it," his father said without waiting for him to answer.

EXCELLENT, said Death, clapping its bony hands together. I HAVE PREPARED A CONTRACT WITH ALL THE RELEVANT DETAILS. IF YOU WOULD READ IT, AND SIGN IF THE TERMS ARE AGREEABLE, THEN WE CAN HAVE EVERYTHING SETTLED RIGHT HERE. I AM VERY BUSY, AFTER ALL, AND HAVE BEEN AWAY FROM MY POST FOR TOO LONG ALREADY AS IT IS.

A piece of paper appeared out of thin air in a flash of blue fire. Once again, his father failed to react as if anything out of the ordinary was happened. Jaune took a peek at the contract, and found it entirely blank, even as his father seemed to be reading it intently.

He looked over at Death, who showed no signs of being apologetic about whatever strange supernatural mind tricks were going on.

"These are generous terms. Very generous," his father said, his eyebrows rising up to his hairline after perusing an entirely blank piece of parchment for five minutes. "This will be a very intensive apprenticeship, I take it? Will he have time to visit home? Where exactly do you practice your trade?"

HE WILL BE WHERE HE NEEDS TO BE AND HAVE AS MUCH TIME AS HE NEEDS TO HAVE. I AM SURE YOUR PATHS WILL CROSS AGAIN. AS FOR LOCATION, HM. IT WOULD NOT BE AN EXAGGERATION TO SAY THAT THERE IS NO CORNER ON REMNANT BEYOND MY REACH.

To Jaune's dismay, his father looked impressed. "Not many firms operate cross-continents. It'll be a good experience for the lad to see a bit more of the world. Under what name should I look for your company, by the way?"

DEATH, said Death.

His father paused briefly, then let out a dry chuckle.

"Well, that's straightforward, at the very least. A man oughta be upfront and honest about what he does, eh?" He grabbed the magical ballpoint pen that also materialized out of thin air in a flash of blue fire and signed at the bottom of the blank contract. Then he handed it to Death.

The bony fingers closed around the rolled parchment, and Jaune imagined them closing around his neck as well. There was no going back now.

Death tucked the contract into its voluminous sleeves, then the orbs of blue flame flickered towards Jaune. Despite the fact that the rest of Death's face was still entirely concealed in the shadow of its cowl, Jaune got the sinking feeling that it was smiling at him.

EXCELLENT. I MUST REMEMBER TO SEND MY COLLEAGUE A FRUIT BASKET TO THANK HIM FOR THE GOOD ADVICE. LUCKILY, I NOW HAVE AN APPRENTICE TO DEAL WITH THAT ON MY BEHALF. I LOVE IT WHEN THESE THINGS WORK OUT NEATLY.

Jaune gulped audibly. He briefly considered praying for someone, anyone to save him, but he had no idea which deity would hear him, and if it happened to be Death, then his pleas might be interpreted entirely the wrong way.

. . .


	2. Chapter 02

. . .

 _ **Chapter Two**_

 _In Which Apprenticeships Are Not All They're Cracked Up To Be_

. . .

Jaune wondered, not for the first time, why it was called waking up when he usually wound up migrating down from his warm bed to the cold floor sometime in the night. It happened so frequently that he had experimentally decided to try sleeping on the floor, but never once migrated in the opposite direction, although he _had_ once woken up mid-tumble down the stairs. That, and the subsequent broken arm, had put an end to any further experimentation.

It was rare, however, that he woke up to the sight of an unfamiliar ceiling, because the ceiling of his room generally looked the same from both his bed and his floor.

It took a few confused blinks before Jaune remembered that he was no longer in his room.

It took a few more confused blinks before Jaune remembered why he was no longer in his room. It all came back like a rush of hangover-induced nausea, except that Jaune had been too young to appreciate the joys of alcohol and thus hadn't experienced any of the fun before waking up to face the regret of his latest life choices the morning after.

So. Death's Apprentice. Death said that it didn't kill people, but the difference between killing people and making them die was really only semantics as far as Jaune could tell.

It was almost kind of funny; he had failed so hard at becoming a hero that he had somehow wound up becoming the exact opposite of everything he had been working for. Curling up into a ball and giving himself a few days to marinate in his own prepubescent angst was looking like a more and more attractive option.

But even if he wasn't a very good one, Jaune was still an Arc, and his dad had told him that an Arc never gives up.

His mom had hugged him before he left and told him that if things didn't work out, he could always come back home. Knowing that she didn't think he could pull off even an apprenticeship would have been disheartening in any other situation, but right now, Jaune was just relieved to know that he still had a way out of here.

His thoughts stuttered again as Jaune remembered that he didn't remember how he got here, or where exactly 'here' was supposed to be.

He did remember leaving home. There had been enough embarrassing familial affection to sear it into his memory, unfortunately. His mother had been all teary-eyed and his father had put so much effort into his frown that it circled back around into a smile. Even several of his older sisters had made it home in time to see him off with jokes about giving them family discounts that Jaune wasn't really sure were jokes at all.

Jaune had left with his hair thoroughly ruffled, his lungs wheezing from being subjected to too many superhuman hugs, and his steps teetering dangerously as he tried to meander forwards with a knapsack so full that made him look like a giant walking potato from behind.

Death had been waiting for him at the crossroads, which was less symbolic than it sounded given that the anthropomorphic personification had looked less like an eldritch specter and more like a misplaced All Hallows' Eve decoration when juxtaposed against a sunny blue sky and fluffy white clouds.

He had followed Death...and then things got a bit fuzzy, because he couldn't remember where exactly he had followed Death _to._

Given that his scroll no longer seemed to be getting a signal, he was no longer inside the kingdoms. Given the fact that he wasn't up to his armpits in Grimm, Jaune had a sinking feeling that he wasn't outside the kingdoms either. There was a certain staleness to the air, a bleak and sort of sterile pall over everything in the room, and an unnerving sense that something very important was missing, he just couldn't quite put his finger on what.

Then his stomach growled, and all contemplation of the unnaturalness of his new reality was superseded by a pressing need for Pumpkin Pete's Marshmallow Flakes.

With hunger spurring him onwards, the young man intrepidly left the relative safety of his room and ventured forth into the uncharted domain of Death itself in search of sustenance. Or rather, he walked through the door and quite suddenly found himself in a rather utilitarian kitchen, despite being reasonably certain that the door to his room had led into a hallway mere moments before he stepped through it.

"Uh," said Jaune intelligently.

OH GOOD, YOU WOKE, said Death, who was leaning casually on the kitchen table and sipping from an apparently empty teacup. I WAS BEGINNING TO WORRY YOU WOULD NOT.

"How long was I asleep?"

Death gave him a rather contemplative look and replied, ABOUT AN INCH LONGER THAN WHEN YOU ARE AWAKE.

Jaune opened his mouth, then closed it again as his brain processed the fact that this avenue of conversation would not bring him any closer to acquiring Marshmallow Flakes and, thus, was inconsequential.

So instead, he asked, "Do you mind if I, um?" He gestured vaguely towards the refrigerator and cabinets.

Death made an equally vague gesture that Jaune chose to interpret as ' _go ahead_ ' and took another relaxed sip from the seemingly empty teacup. Jaune had questions about that too, but again, they were irrelevant to his quest for breakfast.

Until, that is, he opened the first cabinet and found it empty. And the second. And the third. The fourth contained several pots and pans in pristine shape, and the fifth held various plates and cutlery, but a thorough perusal of the rest of the kitchen and pantry proved that there was nothing resembling comestibles whatsoever.

In hindsight, it was rather silly to assume that Death itself needed to eat, when the anthropomorphic personification seemed perfectly content with the mere pretense of tea. But the slow, horrific realization that Death did not partake in the best cereal in existence only crystallized Jaune's resolution to get out of this apprenticeship, somehow, because the lack of Pumpkin Pete's in a daily breakfast was an irreconcilable difference in basic values that Jaune didn't think he would ever be able to accept.

So he dredged up his courage and turned to look his new master in the eye.

"Why," he asked in the slow tones of a man upon the brink of religious enlightenment, "do you even have a kitchen if you don't have any food?"

FOR THE RESALE VALUE, OF COURSE, answered Death.

Jaune stared at Death for a moment. Then he glanced briefly at the window and stared out into the swirling, fathomless void that he had been carefully ignoring since he woke up. Then he stared at Death once more.

NOTHING WRONG WITH PLANNING AHEAD, said Death with a shrug, and then took another sip of nonexistent tea with nonexistent lips.

"With, uh, with all due respect, um, sir," Jaune said, rubbing the back of his neck nervously, "living people kinda need to eat if we want to stay that way."

This time, Death was the one fixing him with an implacable stare.

I AM WILLING TO MAKE AN EXCEPTION.

Given that this would mean constantly dying of starvation without actually dying, Jaune was less than thrilled about this proposal.

"Uh, thanks, but you really don't have to. I can always just go, you know, grocery shopping. It's no problem; I helped mom get the groceries all the time. Just point me in the right direction and I'll be the best shopper that ever shopped," Jaune said, tacking on a laugh that hopefully didn't sound as nervous as he felt.

Death stroked its chin thoughtfully.

I SUPPOSE THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH TAKING UP EXTRA DUTIES, Death said at last, I READ THAT THE KEY TO TRAINING A GOOD APPRENTICE WAS TO REWARD INITIATIVE. VERY WELL. YOU MAY GO GROCERY SHOPPING AFTER YOU COMPLETE YOUR NORMAL DUTIES.

Inwardly sagging in relief, Jaune said, "Thank you, sir."

Death nodded sagely.

IT IS YOUR FIRST DAY, SO I SUPPOSE WE SHALL START SMALL. YOU REMEMBER MILLY?

Jaune did not, in fact, remember ever meeting a Milly, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that Milly was probably the mare that Death had ridden in on, so Jaune nodded mutely.

IT HAS BEEN A WHILE SINCE HER STABLES WERE LAST CLEANED. DO SO, AND THE REST OF THE DAY IS YOURS TO SPEND AS YOU WISH.

Cleaning out stables? That didn't sound too bad. It didn't sound bad at all, given that Jaune had been secretly terrified that Death would send him out to kill people - or, more accurately, help people die, for all the difference that made. Neatening up a stable that only housed a single horse shouldn't be hard at all.

Fifteen minutes later, Jaune stood in front of what could be, possibly, a stable, complicated only by the fact that he could barely see any part of the building poking out from the massive pile of literal horse shit that it was buried in. Milly calmly munched on a mouthful of hay a few meters to Jaune's left and then a few more meters straight up in the air, safely above the mess of her own making.

Jaune felt like kicking his past self in the shin and saying some very bad words.

'A WHILE', by Death's standards, was apparently a whole lot longer than 'a while' by any sane, mortal standards.

He looked down at the shovel in his hands and muttered morosely to himself, "I'm gonna need a wheelbarrow, aren't I?"

At least, now he had a very good idea why it was called 'waking up'.

It was because the rest of day, inevitably, went downhill.

. . .

There was an ancient saying passed down through the oldest Mistrali temples, and it went something like this: ' _before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.'_ There was, no doubt, some profound truth hidden in those words, but this had been lost in the fog of ages. Now, it was mostly used by the older monks to fool the younger acolytes into doing more than their daily allotment of chores.

Far, far away in an entirely different plane of reality, this long lost truth of enlightenment was discovered by young Jaune Arc as he tipped his umpteenth wheelbarrow load of horse manure over the edge of a cliff where it tumbled away into the fathomless void.

In keeping with the trials on the road to enlightenment, it had taken him many stages of grief and suffering to reach this point.

He had spent the first ten or so wheelbarrows grumbling to himself.

Then, around the twentieth load, he had started wondering if there was any deeper meaning behind the task that Death had assigned. His arms had been burning with exertion by then, and his olfactory senses had gone completely numb from the unceasing affront of the stench. _'Maybe this is like some sort of training,_ ' he thought, thinking back to all the Spruce Willis kung-fu flicks he had seen, where a master sent the student on some seemingly meaningless errand only for it to turn out to be some kind of profound technique.

He threw himself full-force into the next thirty or so wheelbarrows, and by then, his exhaustion had become so complete that even his thoughts were as woozy as he was. In his muddled state, Jaune wondered, ' _Or maybe this is an allergy. Wait. That doesn't sound quite right. An allegory? Or is that a metaphor?_ '

After that point, he had been too tired to care, and fell into a mindless repetition of shovel, wheel, dump for what felt like an eternity. If he had been thinking straight, he might have noticed that it should not have been possible for a single boy of thirteen years old to move such a large volume of fecal matter in a single sitting, but thankfully, he had been thinking in circles for quite a while now, and so he never noticed that what he was doing was technically impossible.

He didn't manage to snap out of his unhappy little mental circle until he managed to scrape up one last load and send it tumbling over the edge to the inaudible chime of spiritual enlightenment.

"...this is such bullshit," Jaune realized the truth of his situation at last, which was literally inaccurate because a bull was altogether the wrong kind of animal, but it was metaphorically the precise summation of his current circumstances. Normally, his mother would have smacked him for foul language, but given what he had been through, he rather thought she would forgive him just this once.

He heroically repressed the urge to hurl the wheelbarrow and shovel over the edge as well, and instead returned them neatly to the toolshed where he had found them because he had been raised properly, thank you very much, before stalking back through the front door. He did this by throwing open the double cast iron doors with a bang, which seemed suitably imposing for his current temper - or it would have been, if he hadn't been making squelching sounds and trekking horse manure right up the black granite stairs leading up to them.

"Done," said Jaune flatly as he trudged his way into Death's study.

Death, who had been thumbing through a prodigiously huge ledger with the empty teacup still in hand, looked up and said, EXCELLENT. The Death paused and rather deliberately set down its tea in a rather affronted fashion. WHAT _IS_ THAT SMELL?

"Me," said Jaune in the same inflectionless tone of voice.

AH. There was another pause. I ASSUME YOU HAVE UNDERSTOOD THE TRUE PURPOSE BEHIND YOUR TASK, THEN?

"It wasn't because you were up to your eyebrows in horse dung?" asked Jaune, raising an incredulous eyebrow.

Death took a prim and proper sip of nonexistent tea and said, NO, THAT WAS IT EXACTLY. GOOD. TEN POINTS FOR PRAGMATISM. KEEPING A LEVEL HEAD AND NOT PUTTING ON AIRS IS VERY IMPORTANT IN THIS LINE OF WORK.

Jaune felt his eye twitch. Huh. So that was what it felt like. He'd never been angry enough for that to happen before, albeit he had apparently caused it plenty of times in all sorts of authority figures. He felt rather bad about it now. Being the twitcher was even less fun than being the twitchee.

Unlike his various authority figures though, it wasn't like he could tell Death to go sit in a corner and think about what he'd done.

So instead, Jaune closed his eyes for a long moment, and spoke evenly.

"I'd like to go get those groceries now, if I may."

For flaky marshmallow goodness, Jaune could forgive even a mountain of horse shit.

. . .

Once upon a time, the wastelands between each small blip of human civilization outside the safety of the kingdoms had been completely devoid of any sort of human influence. Huntsmen and soldiers had been trying and failing to reclaim the roads from the Grimm for generations, to no avail. Where noble sentiment and valiant heroics failed, however, capitalism succeeded, because a man named Justin Wright had a dream, and that dream was to exploit the two of the richest types of people on Remnant who weren't named Schnee: huntsmen and bandits.

Through the power of charging quadruple the lien for half the amount of goods, the Just Rite chain of waystations was born, bringing miracles such as hard liquor and flushable public toilets to the various kinds of bad asses and bad apples that traversed the wastelands. Said stations were also, without exception, staffed by either freakishly cheerful people whose smiles might as well have been fixed in place by industrial starch, or world-weary veterans who wouldn't bat an eye if a Beowulf came in and ordered a beer.

After fifteen years on the job, the shopkeeper of Just Rite Store #337 had moved firmly from the first category into the second. He had seen all sorts of people pass through the bulletproof glass sliding doors, from bandits to huntsmen to huntsmen bandits, each one stranger than the last.

The latest arrival, however, still had him raising one bushy eyebrow in bemusement. He also crinkled his nose, because good _gods_ , the kid stank to high heaven.

"I'll take every box of Pumpkin Pete's you've got," the kid growled, slamming an entire stack of lien onto the bar counter.

The shopkeeper opened his mouth to ask the kid where his parents were, but the kid cut him off.

"No. Just. Don't ask. You don't want to know," the kid said, giving him the same thousand-yard-stare that shopkeeper had only seen on old soldiers thrice the boy's age.

So instead, the shopkeeper just shrugged and said, "Sure, I'll go get the rest of our stock from the back."

He did so, and the boy wobbled back out the doors after casually violating the laws of physics by somehow shoving fifty boxes of cereal into a single knapsack. The shopkeeper watched on as the boy whistled, summoning a horse that also casually violated of physics by appearing out of thin air, picking the boy up by the scruff of his neck like an angry kitten, and galloping off into the sky.

The shopkeeper stared for a while longer, and then shrugged and rummaged under the counter for another cigarette.

Still not the strangest customer he'd seen.

. . .

 _One intervening chapter down, two more to go - hold onto your butts folks._


	3. Chapter 03

. . .

 _ **Chapter Three**_

 _In Which It's Less of a Learning Curve and More of a Learning Cliff_

. . .

The room was deathly silent, save for the occasional scratch of quill on parchment.

Then, there was a rustle of cloth, a creak of a chair, and a rather put-upon sigh.

BRING ME LEDGER NUMBER FORTY-TWO, Death intoned in a voice that heralded the fall of nations, albeit the ominous rumble was somewhat offset by the rather oversized, fluffy pink feather quill that Death flourished as it spoke, IT SHOULD BE THE GREEN BOOK WITH THE LITTLE SWIRLY GOLD THINGIES ON THE SPINE.

"Yes sir," replied Jaune, who had been quietly suffering at a small desk in the corner as he attempted to read through the book Death had assigned him. He would have had more luck if he had been literate in ancient Vytalian, but given that the last native speaker had died approximately four thousand years prior, the boy had about as much luck as an ancient Vytalian might have trying to decipher the modern internet. In other words, he had long since stopped trying and instead poured his efforts into doodling scenes of space huntsmen fighting alien grimm in the margins between paragraphs. The illustrations would add an entirely new layer of interesting implications for whichever unfortunate soul attempted to decipher the text in the future, seeing as it was actually a collection of prophecies regarding the apocalypse, but Jaune was blissfully unaware as he shut the book and darted towards the door of the study.

He squeezed his eyes shut as he crossed the threshold and thought ' _LIBRARY_ ' with as much force as he could muster. He found that if he just thought about where he wanted to go as hard as he could, he was more likely to get there. The irony was that, after Death had given him a tour of the place, Jaune found himself even more lost than before, because there had been so many rooms filled with so many interesting things that his mind had an infuriating tendency of wandering towards them whenever he was stepping through a doorway. This, sometimes sent him to the room in question, sometimes sent him to his original intended destination, and one time just left him suspended in a terrifying empty void until Death had dragged him, shaking and trembling, back out by the back of his collar.

His foot landed in a familiar plush carpet. Jaune cracked open an eye to see rows of bookshelves and his shoulders sagged a bit in relief.

"Okay, ledger number forty-two, four two, four two, green with gold swirly thingies. Wait. Or was it gold with green swirly thingies?" Jaune mumbled to himself as he darted between the towering shelves, scanning each one warily. The last thing he wanted to do was overlook the book in question and venture too far in. The library, as far as Jaune could tell, was infinite. The shelves stretched off into the darkness in every direction. Death hadn't warned him about anything dangerous in this particular room, but then again, there was a fifty percent chance that Death had a very skewed idea of what constituted as danger, and another fifty percent chance that Death knew perfectly well but decided not to say anything because it would funnier that way.

Fortunately, he needn't have worried, because he couldn't have missed the ledger if he tried.

Unfortunately, this was because the book took up nearly an entire shelf on its own and was about as thick as his head. It was, in fact, green with gold swirly thingies, and the gleaming numbers '4' and '2' were embossed boldly down the spine.

"Great," said Jaune flatly. He pulled it off the shelf and his arms promptly buckled under its weight.

The boy was made of sterner stuff than that, though, and it would take more than a fiendishly heavy tome to dishearten an Arc. Putting on his game face, Jaune mustered all the strength in his wiry frame and began determinedly dragging the book towards the exit, huffing and puffing the entire time.

In classic Jaune Arc fashion, he made excellent headway until the worst possible moment, upon which he failed spectacularly. The book caught on a rumple in the thick carpet, his fingers slipped from the edges, and the heavy hardcover ledger smashed down firmly on his big toe.

Jaune clutched his foot in pain and stumbled backwards through the door of the library, not even remotely thinking of the right destination.

There was a woosh, and Jaune found himself flat on his back on a cold marble floor. He cracked open an eye and felt all the air whoosh out of his lungs as he stared up at a vortex of glimmering stars that slowly rotated around the circular room.

He hadn't ever been in this room - or at least, this part of this particular room - before.

There were towering shelves, like the library, but these shelves were nearly entirely empty. There were only a few hourglasses in the entire atrium, but compared to the hourglasses he had seen in the lifetimer room, these were unspeakably more beautiful, each one intricate and unique in their own ways.

Jaune looked down, and to his shock, found that the stars above were mirrored beneath the cold marble. No, that wasn't quite right - there were far more stars below his feet than above his head. In fact, as he watched, one of the stars near the bottom of the vortex slowly drifted downwards towards the middle of the room, where the funnel and its reflection met, and then kept drifting, down below his feet.

The entire room, Jaune realized, was a massive hourglass.

He found himself staring, transfixed, as the a sense of immeasurable weight seemed to settle over the stillness. It was easily one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen, and yet, for some reason, watching as the pinprick lights slowly drained away into the cold ground filled him with a strange and ancient sense of sorrow. Almost unconsciously, Jaune reached out towards one of the falling lights, wondering if he could catch it before it -

THAT WOULD NOT BE WISE. A hand settled his shoulder and tightened its grip like a vice.

Jaune let out a girlish scream and nearly leapt out of his skin.

Death made an amused clicking sound.

Blushing to the roots of his hair, Jaune muttered, "You surprised me."

YOU DID NOT RETURN. I WAS CONCERNED YOU HAD STUMBLED INTO SOMETHING YOU OUGHT NOT TO HAVE.

Jaune bit his lip briefly and glanced around. The room certainly looked like one of those places might be very, very off-limits. Paling slightly, he asked, "...did I?"

There was a pause, and then Death shook its head.

There was an uncomfortable silence as master and apprentice stood side by side, watching stars trickle away, before Jaune marshalled what remained of his courage and said, "Then, if I may ask, what...what _is_ this place?"

THIS, Death said without so much as a gesture, IS WHERE THE LIVES OF THE GODS ARE NUMBERED.

Jaune distantly felt his jaw drop. He numbly looked around the room again. The nearly empty room.

Seeing the unspoken question in his eyes, Death explained, NOT MANY FOLK ARE SUPER RELIGIOUS THESE DAYS.

"Do gods _die_ when people stop believing in them?"

Death made a thoughtful 'hmm' before saying, THAT IS NOT AN ACCURATE QUESTION.

Jaune wanted to ask how, exactly, a question could be inaccurate, but there was a strange weight behind Death's words - more weight than usual, at any rate - that made the words die on his lips.

So instead, he swallowed dryly and turned his eyes back towards the stars above.

"Which god is that one for then?"

NONE OF THEM. OR ALL OF THEM, FROM A CERTAIN POINT OF VIEW. THAT IS THE LIFETIMER OF THIS UNIVERSE.

The words dropped like lead weights in Jaune's stomach. He looked down at the sea of lights below his feet. Then up at the much emptier seeming lights above his head. In muted horror, he said, "But...there are so few left."

Death shrugged helplessly.

IT _IS_ CALLED REMNANT FOR A REASON.

"Is there anything we can do to fix it?" asked Jaune.

FIX? said Death sharply, and there was an edge of coldness in Death's tone that Jaune had never heard before as it turned its blazing starfire eyes upon its apprentice with a terrible force. IT IS NOT BROKEN. IT IS SIMPLY WHAT IT IS.

"Oh," said Jaune in a very small voice, "sorry."

Death seemed to relent and spoke in a softer tone, BETTER TO BE SALTED BY THE TRUTH THAN TO MARINATE IN IGNORANCE. Death paused before adding, AND AVOID SUPERFLUOUS METAPHORS WITH UNINTENDED IMPLICATIONS.

Jaune nodded mutely.

Death kindly patted the boy's shoulder.

NOW, ISN'T THERE SOMETHING YOU WERE MEANT TO BE DOING?

"Oh, right. The ledger," Jaune murmured, and ducked his head sheepishly before scurrying towards the door.

He did look back, just for a moment before he crossed the threshold, and saw Death pensively watching the life of the universe trickle away. Death's expression was impossible to read, but somehow, Jaune thought his mentor looked almost sad.

It was such a distracting thought that he didn't even notice he had stepped into library without trouble, despite failing to think LIBRARY at all.

At least not until he tripped over the giant book that he had dropped right inside the entrance.

. . .

"I'm really, really sorry about this," Jaune said, cringing.

"No, no, it's quite alright," the kindly grandmother said, patting him reassuringly on the arm, "Take your time, dearie. It's not like I have better places to be." This was, in fact, patently untrue, but she said it anyway to be kind.

IT'S ALL IN THE WRIST, Death advised unhelpfully.

Jaune took a deep breath, carefully braced his feet at shoulder width, centered himself, tightened his grip, and took another swing. The scythe swished harmlessly through the kindly old woman, failing to disturb even a hair from her neatly wound bun. His swing carried on in a full circle, passing through an unfortunate bonsai that instantly wilted, nicking the whiskers off the old woman's rotund cat, who opened one baleful yellow eye to glare at him before going back to sleep, and finally ending in an ungainly sprawl at Death's feet.

"Oh dear. You didn't sprain anything, did you?" the old lady fussed, helping the poor boy back onto his feet.

"Only my pride," replied Jaune in a rather resigned tone.

"Well, as they say, tenth time's the charm."

"Do they?"

The grandmother placed both hands on her hips and levelled the sort of look at him that could probably convince violent murderers to pick up litter as community service. "They certainly do now," she said, giving his arm another reassuring squeeze, "Just have faith in yourself."

HMM. IS THAT A PUMPKIN PETE MASCOT PARADE, I WONDER, Death noted idly.

"What? Where?" Jaune's head turned sharply towards the window, despite the fact that they were in a log cabin half-a-day's walk from the nearest train station and surrounded by dirt roads in all directions. Death took advantage of the distraction to quickly to snatch a pebble from the pot of the now desiccated bonsai.

IT APPEARS I WAS MISTAKEN, Death, unruffled by Jaune's skeptical and somewhat betrayed glare. ANYHOW, AS PATIENT AS THE MADAM HAS BEEN, I BELIEVE YOUR LACK OF TALENT IN THIS ENDEAVOR HAS BEEN MORE THAN SUFFICIENTLY DEMONSTRATED. Death then held up the pebble with a flourish. AS SUCH, I SHALL BESTOW UPON YOU THIS RELIC OF UNFATHOMABLE POWER.

"...it looks like a rock," said Jaune.

A RELIC OF UNFATHOMABLE POWER, Death continued uninterrupted, WHICH WILL ENDOW YOU WITH THE ABILITY TO PERFORM THE TASKS AT HAND IN A TIMELY MANNER SO THAT WE CAN ALL BE HOME IN TIME FOR AFTERNOON TEA.

Jaune obediently turned his palm upwards and let Death place the small rock in the center of his hand. He cringed, half-expecting some sort of arcane backlash, but the pebble just sat innocuously in the center of his palm, looking and feeling exactly like what it was.

"Huh. _Neat,"_ said Jaune, before he gingerly picked up his practice scythe once again and gave the elderly grandmother a tremulous smile.

"Tenth time's the charm," she repeated with an eye-crinkling smile.

"Tenth time's the charm," Jaune echoed, then closed his fist tightly around the pebble in one hand and swung with the other.

There was a violent whoosh, and Jaune found getting intimately familiar with the floor once again. This time, however, he heard a chime of musical laughter, and looked up to see a tall and stunning woman, with hair like spun gold spilling around her shoulders like a waterfall and a smile that could outshine like the sun.

Jaune opened his mouth, and then clicked it shut again without managing to say anything.

' _Well done,_ ' said the woman, stretching her new limbs and celebrating her rejuvenated joints with an experimental bounce on the balls of her feet. The rest of her also bounced, and Jaune felt his throat go very dry.

"T-thanks," he somehow managed to stammer, "sorry it took so long."

She made a familiar eye-crinkling smile and reached over to give his cheek a grandmotherly pat despite her not at all grandmotherly appearance. ' _You managed just fine in the end, young man. Hold onto that earnestness of yours, and you'll always find a way as long as you keep trying.'_

Then she straightened and gave Death a polite curtesy before twirling on her heel in a whirl of golden motes of light. Jaune heard her voice echo faintly, ' _Ebon, you silly man! Were you seriously waiting this entire time?'_ and then she was gone.

There was a moment of respectful silence.

Then Jaune said, "She was really pretty. Do all old people get young again when they die?"

THAT HOW SHE ALWAYS WAS. APPEARANCES JUST GOT IN THE WAY, Death answered, already turning towards the door.

Jaune didn't quite understand, but nodded anyway out of habit. This was nothing new, since he had learned the hard way that it was better to nod and not ask. The explanation was inevitably abstract nonsense, or, when it was sense, it was the kind of metaphysical sense that no thirteen-year-old was properly equipped to handle. There was already far too much of it rattling inside his head; any more and it'd probably start coming out of his ears and displacing other important things, like common sense. Jaune already had so little of it that he feared losing any more would push him below the poverty line of overall mental wellness.

So he nodded, folded up his training scythe, and slipped the 'relic of unfathomable power' into his jacket pocket before following Death through the cottage door.

There was a whirl of disorientation as Death casually bent the fabric of space and time, and then Jaune found himself plopped straight into a thicket of thorns.

"Ow," said Jaune flatly without an ounce of surprise. This was just how things in his life generally went; he was used to it.

Death, who had been walking a few paces in front of him, stopped rather abruptly, and said two words that you generally never wanted to hear from the anthropomorphic personification of one of the fundamental aspects of reality:

OH DEAR.

For a single shining moment, Jaune wondered if his mentor was expressing concern for his current thorny predicament.

That small hope shrank as quickly as a wet slug in a barrel of salt because Death followed those two words with, IT SEEMS WE ARE MORE PRESSED FOR TIME THAN I THOUGHT.

Jaune thrashed weakly in a futile attempt to disentangle himself from the rosebush.

"What happened?"

TERRIBLE MINE ACCIDENT IN ATLAS, Death said, stroking its chin thoughtfully. I HAD THAT SCHEDULED FOR NEXT WEEK, BUT IT SEEMS WE OVERESTIMATED THEIR WORKPLACE SAFETY PROTOCOLS.

"That's...horrible," said Jaune, ceasing his struggle in favor of a horrified expression, "Are a lot of people hurt?"

THAT DEPENDS, said Death, ON HOW QUICKLY I GET THERE.

Jaune swallowed hard and tried not to feel ill. He tried very hard not to imagine being trapped in a dark mineshaft, or being caught in a dust explosion. A vivid imagination, unfortunately, was not one of the things that had been displaced by all the myriad of metaphysical truths crammed into his head since the start of his apprenticeship.

"A...are we going to Atlas then?"

Death looked him up and down before saying simply, _WE_ ARE NOT.

Then disappeared. Waist deep in a rosebush in some indeterminate forest of Remnant, Jaune quite suddenly found himself alone.

. . .

It took Jaune approximately fifteen minutes to free himself from the thicket. Unfortunately, thorn bushes were one of the few plants that became even more troublesome after they died, and scythes were actually terrible at cutting through things that weren't solitary and at arm's length. The boy took a moment to lament his favorite pair of jeans, because one particularly nasty thorn had caught him in the knee and torn straight through the denim. He could see the entirety of his knobby knee through the hole, which probably meant that it was too big to be mended even if he had a needle and thread on hand.

He sat down on a relatively inoffensive patch of forest floor and began picking the thorns out of himself. This took approximately another fifteen minutes, as there were a lot of thorns.

Then there was nothing to do except wait. Jaune leaned back against the tree and listened for the sounds of the forest. It was utterly silent. This, unfortunately, was par for course, since there was always a dramatic sort of hush that seemed to settle over any place Death passed through. The only sound that ever followed, it seemed, was the racket of clumsy apprentice stumbling into things.

He checked his scroll. Two minutes had crawled past.

He rummaged through his pockets and retrieved a rumpled piece of paper with the names and times of all the people they had been scheduled to visit. He checked his scroll again. Another three minutes had gone by.

He tried to calling home and got automatically shunted to voicemail. His parents must have been out on another mission.

He looked at the piece of paper again, nervously noting that it was only ten minutes before Death was scheduled to visit the next person on the list. He made an agitated circle around the small forest clearing, but there was no sign of his mentor.

Just as he was about to pull out his scroll and check the time again, he finally heard something other than the sound of leaves and twigs crunching under his own feet Namely, the sound of someone else violently thrashing through the underbrush. He would know - he had been making the exact same kind of racket as he tried to free himself earlier.

Unfortunately, unlike his pitched battle with a rosebush, the other person's encounter with the thick underbrush was accompanied by the chilling sound of Beowolf howls.

In other words, someone was in trouble, and that person was going to die sometime in the next five minutes if they were the next person on Death's list. Deep in the some nondescrepit woods, the chances of someone overhearing their plight and coming to the rescue were vanishingly small.

That is, if you didn't count the thirteen-year-old boy in torn-up jeans equipped with nothing but a training scythe and a pebble of dubious arcane power.

So, in a rather reasonable fashion, Jaune asked himself with a slight note of panic, ' _What on Remnant am I doing?_ ' Because he seemed to have temporarily ceded control of his limbs, and they seemed intent on carrying him _toward_ the sound of howling murderbeasts instead of in the opposite direction like any sane person. Despite his fervent attempts to reverse directions, his body seemed intent on cheerfully barreling towards certain death.

He also noted, distantly, that the thorny bushes in his way had gone from fifteen minute affairs to split second hindrances as he swung his scythe and they parted neatly in two before him with no resistance. The same held true for pretty much everything else in his way as well; the scythe flashed forward in a shimmering blue arc, and everything gave way. Jaune had no idea how he was doing it, just that he was.

Perhaps, Jaune mused, while the universe made his life harder whenever he tried to do something sensible, it made up for it by making his life easier whenever he was about to do something really, really stupid. It would explain quite a lot.

He burst through a particularly thick clump of undergrowth and found himself in another larger forest clearing.

Three things happened roughly at once.

Five Beowulfs lunged at a fallen, bloodied figure on the ground with terrifying snarls.

The fallen woman snarled just as fiercely with a viscious glint in her eye.

She then slammed what looked like a stove lighter into a shining red crystal that was unmistakeably Fire Dust.

" _Oh f-_ " Jaune began, before the entire clearing was swallowed up by a massive explosion and Jaune found himself blasted right back into the undergrowth that he had just vacated.

For a few moments, the world was nothing but a blinding flash of heat and light.

Then, gradually, the flash faded away, leaving Jaune seeing spots and hearing a high pitched ringing in his ears. Dazed, singed, and tossed headfirst in a thicket of thorns that was also on fire, Jaune said in a flat voice, "Ow."

He struggled free and was greeted by a blackened clearing that was also, unsurprisingly, on fire. The only thing left of the Beowolves were a few trails of black smoke rising up from the ground, and the only thing left of the person they had been chasing were a few charred bits...all over the place.

Jaune gazed calmly upon the scene, before deciding that surrender was the better part of valor and bent over to retch violently into the bushes.

' _Well, I'm glad that plan worked,'_ said a woman's voice.

Jaune valiantly suppressed the remainder of his dry heaves to look up at the speaker. It was the woman he had seen earlier, surveying the fiery blast zone with arms crossed and a carefully bland expression on her face. She looked to be in good health, except for the fact that she was also translucent.

' _Sorry for getting you caught up in that,_ ' she added, ' _Glad to see you're sturdier than you look._ '

Jaune straightened and took a deep, bracing breath before managing to croak, "...R-Rachel Pine?"

She nodded curtly and said, ' _That's me. Are you my ride outta here?_ '

"I, well, yeah," Jaune answered. He couldn't quite meet her eyes as he apologized, "I'm sorry I didn't get here in time to...to..." He trailed off, unsure of what exactly he had been planning to do even if he had made it here early enough to intervene. He wasn't even sure he was allowed to intervene.

The ghost of Rachel Pine, however, let out a brusque guffaw and said, ' _What was a skinny kid like you gonna do? Don't sweat it. I knew what I was doing._ '

"But...you blew yourself up."

' _And took all of those bastards with me. You win some, you lose some,_ ' she said with a nonchalant shrug, ' _I did think I'd be more upset about kicking the bucket, but in hindsight, it's not like being upset will change anything anyhow._ '

That was certainly one way to look at it, Jaune supposed, and he'd much rather be dealing with a surprisingly laid back ghost than a hysterical one.

"Then, I guess I'll...send you on, if you're ready."

' _Yup. Hook me up,_ ' the spirit said.

Jaune swallowed the lump in his throat and swung.

At first, nothing seemed to happen, just like the first nine times he had tried today, but then the familiar glow began to suffuse itself throughout Rachel Pine's soul. She held up her hands in front of her face, watching in mild fascination.

' _Huh. Tingly,_ ' she said.

"It shouldn't take long," Jaune said in his best reassuring voice.

They both watched on in silence as the golden motes of light spread up her waist, then torso, and her fingertips began dissolving into the ether as well.

' _Oh, yeah, just remembered something. Mind taking care of a last request?'_ the ghost of Rachel Pine suddenly said, just as the last of her began fading out. Her voice was already distant, as if speaking from the other end of a long tunnel.

"Of course," said Jaune without thinking.

 _'Before this merry forest chase, I locked my son in the cellar,_ ' she said, ' _If you could let him out, that'd be swell._ '

Then she disappeared.

In a rather flat voice, Jaune said, "What."

. . .

The best way to survive a Grimm attack, according to the Annual Mistral Farmer's Almanac, was to make yourself as unappetizing as possible.

Well, to be entirely accurate, the best way to survive a Grimm attack was to not be present for a Grimm attack, but since that clearly wasn't an option for most Almanac readers by the time they recalled this specific piece of advice, the second best way to avoid being on the menu was the think happy thoughts. It had yet to be scientifically proven as effective - if only because most survivors were too traumatized to recount what they were thinking at the time, and most non-survivors were unavailable for comment - but if you were going to die anyway, you might as well die thinking about something pleasant.

This was, unfortunately, easier said than done for Oscar Pine, seeing as he was currently trapped all alone in a pitch black cellar with nothing but the smell of last year's pickled vegetables for company. He didn't even particularly like pickles, and he found he liked them even less now that he was in one. The thought of being served up as an entrée that came with a side of relish, ironically, was not a thought that Oscar particularly relished.

' _I am going to die, and all I can come up with to distract myself are pickle puns_ ,' the boy thought glumly. He couldn't really come up with anything more dignified to think about though; the smell of salt and vinegar was too strong.

The cellar door suddenly rattled, and Oscar's heart lurched, because the Grimm were finally upon him.

Instead of bursting through the old oaken doors in a flurry of fangs and splinters, however, the Grimm instead muttered discontentedly to itself. There was a prolonged jangling sound, then a click, and finally a scrape and a creak as it went through half a dozen incorrect keys before finding the right one to unbolt the cellar door.

Light spilled into Oscar's dark corner of marinating woes, and he had to squint against the light before the Grimm in question resolved itself into the shape of a gangly, blonde-haired boy no more than a few years older than himself.

There was an awkward pause before the other boy firmly applied his palm to his face and muttered to himself, "Oh, great, that's what I get for assuming. It's not like mom looks old enough to have eight kids; you think I'd know better than to assume. Damn it. What am I supposed to do now? Scratch messages in the dirt? Write words on the wall? Way to plan ahead, Jaune."

Oscar took a wary half-step backwards. Mother always told him that to give people who talked to themselves wide berth. Doubly so if they were holding something sharp and pointy, like the menacing six-foot tall scythe that the other boy was casually leaning on like a walking stick. There was no telling what kind of nutcases decided to wander through their corner of the Mistrali lowlands, after all.

Oscar Pine was also, however, a very polite boy, and since said nutcase was between him and the only exit, he had double the reason to be polite.

So Oscar ventured meekly, "E-excuse me?"

The other boy blinked. Glanced over his own shoulder. Blinked at Oscar once more. Pointed questioningly at himself.

Oscar nodded.

"You...can see me? And hear me?"

"...yes?" answered Oscar. There was always a chance he was hallucinating, but given the choice between believing in his own sanity or someone else's, he preferred to live under the comforting assumption that the other party was the crazy one.

The other party in question frantically rummaged through his pockets and pulled out a rumpled sheet of paper.

"Your name wouldn't happen to be Ruddy Whittaker, would it? Or, Hugo Beet?"

"No? I'm Oscar. Oscar Pine."

The older boy scratched his head in bemusement and checked whatever was written on the page one more time.

"You're not on the list. I guess the whole notice-me-not thing wears off if I'm by myself. Huh, weird. I don't usually find out about these sorts of things without some kind of abject humiliation involved," he said as he folded up the paper and stuffed it back into his pocket. Then he sheepishly extended a hand and added, "But, uh, I guess I'm Jaune. Jaune Arc."

Not wanting to be rude, Oscar gingerly accepted the handshake. The newly-introduced Jaune Arc seemed like a nice person, even if his overall mental stability was very questionable.

The moment they shook hands, however, Oscar felt a chill race through him, and all the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, as if electrified. Jaune's grip was cold, colder than anything he had ever felt before, and Oscar involuntarily shuddered.

Luckily, Jaune didn't seem to notice as he continued blithely, "Anyway, we need to get you somewhere safe. Is there anyone you can stay with? Relatives, friends, local authorities?"

"My aunt," Oscar replied, still somewhat shaken, "she lives about two days northeast, near the train station."

The older boy nodded and put two fingers in his mouth to whistle. Then he stared up at the sky expectantly.

In a very dramatic fashion, nothing happened.

"Right," Jaune said with a sigh, "because that would be too easy. Walking it is then."

He took a step in the northeastern direction, but Oscar caught his sleeve. Oscar couldn't just leave his home behind without asking even if he was dreading the most likely answer. But he had to know. Swallowing a painful lump in his throat, he whispered, "...what about my mom?"

Jaune stopped. Then, in a very soft voice, he said, "I'm sorry. I didn't reach her in time."

Oh. Well. That was that. No point in staying then. Numbly, Oscar felt Jaune tug on his arm to lead him away from the cellar. The other boy's touch was still inhumanly cold, but it was gentler this time, and less foreign.

' _Don't think about it. Don't think about it. Don't think about it,_ ' he chanted in his mind, ' _It's not safe to think about it._ '

He thought about it. It was all he could think about. A strangled rose up in his throat, followed by small, hiccup-like sounds as Oscar Pine did his absolute best not to cry.

And then, in typical fashion for how this day seemed to be going, Oscar heard a quiet, "Oh _shit_ " before he was knocked flat on his back as Jaune full-body tackled him to the ground. This would have been rather rude, if not for the more rude intrusion of a terrifying roar and an even more terrifying set of claws that raked through the air above them. Oscar looked up. And up, and up, and up.

The biggest Ursa he had ever seen towered over them like Death incarnate. Or so Oscar thought. He was wrong, of course, as Death incarnate was not quite as tall and had noticeably less fur, but Oscar had no way of knowing that at the moment.

While his mind was busy coming up with grossly inaccurate similes, his body had been doing something more productive, as it had decided to scramble backwards away from the giant evil murder bear. Anyone with any shred of good sense would have done the same. It said volumes, then, that once Oscar had dared to glance at the only other person present, he discovered that the blonde boy had instead clambered to his feet and planted himself in between Oscar and the Ursa with arms outstretched.

"Y-You can't eat him! He's not on the list," stammered Jaune.

Oscar gaped. Even the Ursa seemed momentarily stunned by the blonde's abject lack of self-preservation.

Then it swatted him like a fly, and he went flying like a rag doll. He even bounced a few times before landing in a heap. It would have been funny if it hadn't been such a tragically stupid way to die.

Except he didn't. Even though the blow should have crushed every bone in his body, the older boy only made a small grunt of pain before he was back on his feet as quickly as he could get all his limbs untangled. He charged back at the Ursa with wild swipes of his scythe.

"You can't!" Jaune cried, sounding more desperate this time, "He's not supposed to die!"

His scythe passed though the Ursa like air and did nothing. It didn't even leave a scratch on the black Grimm flesh. The Ursa swatted him again, this time towards the house, and Oscar heard a wince-inducing cacophony of splintering wood and shattering crockery as Jaune hit the side of the house and kept going right through it.

Finally free of the strangely resilient annoyance, the Ursa turned its attention back towards its intended meal and began to advance.

"...Death," came a pained voice from the direction of the house. Then, "...now would be a good time help. _"_

In a very dramatic fashion, nothing happened. Nothing good, at any rate.

"...please. Help!"

No one answered.

The Ursa let out a bellowing roar. Oscar clambered to his feet and turned to run. It was illogical. He couldn't outrun a bear. Yet even so, every fiber in his body screamed at him to run, so he ran.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jaune picking himself up out of the rubble. Then the older boy was running towards them again, despite looking like he had gotten into a fight with an Ursa and lost (which he had), despite being unarmed (his scythe had been lost somewhere in the debris), and despite being too far away to reach them in time (if he could run at all with his leg as beat up as it looked).

"Stop," he yelled, "stop, _stop!_ " No one listened to him though.

Then Oscar stumbled. The Ursa leapt.

Suddenly, Oscar heard Jaune's voice from everywhere and nowhere at once, ringing in his ears like a funeral bell.

STOP, Jaune screamed, and the world stopped in a flash of purple.

Oscar turned to find the Ursa suspended in mid-air, its claws and fangs mere inches away from tearing into him. It was completely still. Everything, it seemed, was completely still. There was even a strange staleness to the air that made it hard to breathe, and all the color of the world seemed muted, somehow.

Jaune's hand came down on Oscar's shoulder, even though Oscar hadn't seen the older boy cross the distance between them. The scythe had somehow found its way back into Jaune's hand, and its blade seemed to shine with an eerie blue light that definitely hadn't been there before.

"Let's go," said Jaune, and Oscar could only describe what happened next as: they went.

They were standing outside his ruined house one moment, then with a strange lurching feeling in his stomach, Oscar found them standing outside an entirely different house altogether. If he squinted, it looked familiar. He thought he recognized those petunias growing on the windowsill somehow.

His suspicions were confirmed with the door cracked open, and the shocked face of his aunt greeted him from within.

"Oscar? What are you doing here?" She then noticed the scuffed up dirt marks all over him, and the puffy redness of his eyes. Confusion shifted to alarm as she demanded, "By the gods, what happened?"

"I...Jaune brought me here," Oscar answered, partly because he was just as confused, and partly because he couldn't bring himself to recount the parts he wasn't confused about.

Strangely, his aunt only seemed more puzzled as she asked, "And who is that?"

"Oh, um, right," Oscar mumbled, "Auntie, this is - "

He turned to introduce his aunt to Jaune, and vice versa, only to find himself standing alone. There was no one else in sight, despite the flat farmlands stretching in every direction. There wasn't even anything to hide behind.

He could even still feel the lingering chill where the other boy had gripped his shoulder. There was nowhere for the other boy to have gone, and yet -

He was alone.

. . .

Elsewhere, in a place that was neither here nor there, there was a dialogue between mentor and apprentice. This was not the first of their dialogues, nor would it be the last, but it was, most certainly, _a first_. The beginning of something, so to speak, the moment at which the first pebble of the avalanche that mortals sometimes liked to refer to as destiny began to move. There was nothing particularly notable in this conversation, except, perhaps, the people involved, and the reasons why they were involved in such a talk. It went something like this:

"You were late."

I WAS NEITHER LATE, NOR WAS I EARLY. I ARRIVED PRECISELY WHEN I MEANT TO.

"You couldn't have stopped time and pulled us out of there _before_ I got thrown through a house?"

I DID NOT DO THAT.

"Well, obviously, seeing as I _did_ get tossed through a house. I have splinters...everywhere."

THEN PERHAPS NEXT TIME YOU ENCOUNTER A LARGE ANIMAL, YOU SHOULD NOT PURPOSELY PLACE YOURSELF IN THEIR PATH.

"I...I had to. It was going to eat Oscar. He wasn't supposed to die."

IF YOU HAD JUST LEFT HIM LOCKED IN THE CELLAR, HE WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN IN DANGER IN THE FIRST PLACE.

"Wait, what?"

HE WOULD HAVE SPENT A FEW HOURS THINKING ABOUT NOTHING BUT PICKLES. LONG ENOUGH FOR THE GRIMM IN THE AREA TO DISPERSE.

"Oh. Then...it was my fault. But I couldn't just leave him locked up in there."

AND SO YOU CHOSE TO ACT.

"Why didn't you stop me?"

There was a pause.

WHY SHOULD I HAVE? YOU TOOK RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR ACTIONS. I SAW NO REASON TO INTERVENE.

"But you saved us, at the end."

NO.

"Pardon?"

I DID NOT DO THAT.

"What? But-"

IT SEEMS THAT YOU ARE NOT ENTIRELY LACKING IN TALENT, NOR THE WILLINGNESS TO ACT. YOU LACKED ONLY THE OPPORTUNITY TO DO SO.

"...oh."

There was another long pause.

Then.

"...thanks."

. . .


	4. Chapter 04

**AUTHOR'S NOTE:** (12/9/2017) This is the newest updated chapter, and the second-last chapter of the Apprentice Arc I've squeezed in between the old chapters. Originally, this was going to be the last interquel chapter, but it got so long that I had to split it into two. So we've got one more coming, and then updates will resume in the usual order.

. . .

 _ **Chapter Four**_

 _In Which Making Bad Life Choices Is Like Eating Pringles_

. . .

There was something to be said about the collective intelligence of humanity when an individual could be expected to react with reasonable methods of self-preservation in the face of a Grimm attack, whereas a crowd could be expected to perform a fairly good imitation of panicked lemmings. It was as though all of those government PSAs about ' _What To Do In Case of Grimm Attack, Not That There Will Be One, Please Remain Calm, But Just In Case You Were Curious_ ' had done precisely nothing for the survival skills of the general populace. Just another instance of tax lien that would probably have been better spent distributing free booze, apparently, because even a drunken stupor was a better survival strategy than running around like a headless chicken.

Misspent taxes, however, were the last thing on her mind. Which meant that they were the fourth thing she was thinking about, after 1) the sheer number of Nevermore bearing down on the village, 2) whether or not 'remaining inconspicuous' was more important than the expediency of using lightning to flash fry said flock of Nevermore, and 3) the blonde idiot standing in the middle of village square checking his scroll instead of running for his life. Distracting yourself was admittedly a better tactic than trying to outrun a monster raven with a twenty-foot wingspan, but it only worked if you weren't standing smack dab in the open with absolutely no cover.

Unfortunately, the fact that said blonde was too dumb to live was not an excuse for her to let him die, so she yanked on the reins and spurred her horse towards him, hauling him up by the hood and tossing him over the saddle behind her like a sack of potatoes. Albeit, a particularly unruly bag of tubers given how much he flailed and squirmed and made vaguely angry teenager noises, but she ignored them and focused steering her horse through the sharp Nevermore feathers coming down like acid rain on steroids.

Trying to outrun a giant monster raven on horseback was marginally better than trying to do so on foot. It was a very small margin, measured in a small increase of the Grimm's pre-dinner exercise.

' _So much for travelling incognito,_ ' she thought as she mentally prodded the lump of godly power that had been unceremoniously shoved into a dusty corner of her soul.

The skies darkened. The clouds rumbled. There was a brilliant flash as heavenly retribution descended in a rain of lightning, accompanied by the appropriately dramatic roar of thunder and the somewhat less appropriate smell of cheap fried chicken.

She lowered her hand and mentally heaved a sigh of relief. No self-electrocution this time. Which was good, since that would have been embarrassing, as well as mildly fatal to the blond schmuck she had gone through the trouble of rescuing.

Speaking of which, said blonde schmuck was clinging desperately to her saddlebags in an attempt to stay on the horse, and looking rather green around the gills as he did so. She pulled on the reins and they slowed from a gallop, to a trot, and finally to a full stop, upon which he slowly slid off the horse and reacquainted himself with the ground on shaky legs.

"I'll escort you to nearest shelter," she said in what she hoped was a reassuring tone. "I think I got all of them, but better safe than sorry."

"...give me a moment," he said in a pained tone, staring at the ground as he visibly fought down the urge to violently upchuck. His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed and apologized, "Sorry, motion sickness."

"Of course," she said, graciously accepting his lie even though experiencing nausea after a near-death experience was nothing to be ashamed of.

Fortunately, he managed to pull himself together without expelling the contents of his stomach, and he finally glanced up at her with a rueful look on his face.

"Phew, I think...I think it passed."

She nodded, momentarily taken aback by the unnatural shade of blue that gazed up at her, as well as how oddly familiar he seemed despite the fact that she was fairly certain she had never met this boy before in her life.

But he was also backing away from her as he added, "I'll just be going then. No need to escort me or anything. I'll just go...over there...behind that tree, and, uh, yeah."

Well, she couldn't blame him for being uncomfortable around her. He was just a normal, everyday villager. Lightning-wielding magical girls were probably a tad out of his comfort zone, even without the knowledge that she might have accidentally flash fried him along with the Grimm if her control had slipped even a little bit. Actually, when she thought about it like that, it was a little terrifying for her as well. Mystical magical powers were really more trouble than they were worth.

Speaking of which, she had rather spectacularly blown her cover.

"Don't...tell anyone about this," she said urgently, pulling her hood down over her face, "Please."

"This?" He blinked, looked around at the smoking Nevermore remains that were slowly dissipating all around them, and then cycled through a quick sequence of surprise-confusion-surprise before his expression finally settled on belated realization.

"Oh. _Oh._ That was _you_. I thought...you know what, never mind what I thought," he babbled, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly. He coughed lightly and his cheeks steadily flushed darker as he cleared his throat and continued, "I won't tell anyone."

"Thanks. Be careful," she murmured. He seemed sincere enough, but just to be safe, she should probably make herself scarce before any rumors could start flying.

"You too, I guess," he replied, and made an awkward little wave goodbye before he was jogging back towards the village.

There was a gust of wind, and she closed her eyes for a moment as a foul wisp of Grimm ash wafted towards her. When she opened them again, the blonde-haired boy was nowhere to be seen. Figuring that he must have ducked inside one of the buildings, she gathered up the reins, pulled her hood low over her eyes, and spurred her horse towards the next town, leaving the village and the people she had just saved behind without a word of goodbye, just like she had many times before and just like she would many times to come.

. . .

Running into a swarm of Grimm was a sadly common sort of unfortunate event that could befall anyone. Running into a swarm of Grimm two weeks after the last time you had run into a swarm of Grimm was much less common, but only because most people weren't in any shape to be running two weeks after the first swarm. Running into the same idiot you had saved two weeks ago from a swarm of Grimm three hundred miles away in an entirely different village under attack by an entirely different swarm of Grimm, however, was something else entirely.

He was still on his scroll. Granted, he hadn't had the six-foot-tall scythe last time they met, but he was still checking his text messages as the village apparently burned down around his ears.

"Oh. Hey," he said, spotting her this time before she potato-sacked him.

"What are you _doing_ here?" she demanded as she brained a Beowulf with her staff before it could use him as a chew toy.

He shifted his weight from foot to foot uncomfortably and replied, "Well, it turns out Summer is peak season, so I'm handling the...overwork."

"Running off with your parents' harvest scythe does not make you a huntsman," she told him flatly.

He blinked at her in confusion, and then blinked at the scythe in his hand with an equal measure of confusion. He stared at it as if he had never seen it before in his life, actually. She was beginning to have serious doubts about his overall mental wellness.

"C'mon, it's not safe here," she continued, offering him a hand up onto the horse.

He waved her off, though, and said, "If you're going to help, you should check the cellar in the tavern. Pretty sure they're the last people still in town. I - well. I kind of have a bad track record with getting people out of cellars. If you could take care of that, that'd be great! Thanks, gotta go, bye!"

"Wait!" she shouted, but he was already running off, and another Beowulf decided to leap between them. Once she had smacked the annoying mass of fur and fangs out of the way, he was gone just like before.

There were people in the tavern cellar, just as he said, but they had apparently never even seen the scraggly blonde kid with an oversized scythe. In fact, when she reunited them with the rest of the refugees, no one could remember seeing a boy matching that description passing through town. Even as they searched through all the rubble of the destroyed town, she never found a single sign of him.

. . .

"I swear I'm not a creepy stalker," he said hastily after they met for the third time in as many weeks during equally many Grimm attacks. His expression darkened slightly, and he shouted up at the sky, "It's just that, apparently, _SOMEONE_ finds it funny to keep putting me in these situations!"

There was a rumble of thunder across the overcast skies that she had nothing to do with. It sounded oddly like a guffaw.

"Oh, and incoming from five o'clock," he added in a nonplussed tone.

She whirled her staff in a wide arc behind her without bothering to look and was rewarded with a hefty blow and an angry squeal as the Boarbatusk charging towards her from behind was sent flying into the broad side of a barn. Even as she spun her staff back around to plant a Beowulf skull firmly into the dirt, she was careful to keep the boy in the corner of her eye.

If she looked away, she was pretty sure he'd disappear just like he had after the last two times she had saved him. If she had saved him at all.

He looked like any random village boy from the boonies. Same oversized hoodie, same frayed jeans, same scraggly blonde hair that badly needed liberal application of industrial strength hair conditioner. He looked no different than he had when she first saw him three weeks ago. In fact, he looked _exactly_ the same as he had three weeks ago, down to the tuft hair that stuck up in the back and the shape of the wrinkles in his clothes. It was as no time had passed at all for him, despite the fact that he had crossed half a continent and weathered three Grimm attacks along with her.

As yet another Grimm ignored him entirely in favor of attacking her, a small seed of suspicion took root in the back of her mind. As she dug the survivors out of the collapsed farmhouse and they tearfully thanked her without giving the boy standing behind her so much as a passing glance, that suspicion grew larger.

As they left the grieving family behind and walked down the dirt road leading away, the overcast sky finally parted as if in some symbolic sign that the danger had passed, and the blonde boy whose name she still didn't know had babbled some excuse and jogged back the way they had come. He ducked behind a dilapidated tractor parked in the middle of a field with absolutely zero subtlety, and never appeared out from the other side.

But she had seen enough. She had watched him jog all the way down a muddy dirt path, here and back.

The only set of footprints left behind were hers.

. . .

Somewhere on a metaphysical plane far, far beyond the realms mortal perception, an ancient ritual empowered by centuries upon centuries of human faith stirred to life. It rose like a mighty beast and opened its maw to devour the wayward soul it had been summoned to excise. Before it could sink its metaphorical fangs into its prey, however, it paused. Something was terribly amiss. It tilted its metaphorical head and squinted to get a better look at the target.

Then it made a metaphorical ' _nope_ ' before dispelling itself in high dudgeon.

Meanwhile, in a much more literal realm, a blonde boy crossed his eyes as he tried to get a better look at the small rectangular slip of paper that had been unceremoniously pasted onto his forehead. Other than a loud crinkle as the paper protested its rough treatment, nothing else of note happened.

An few awkward seconds sidled out of the present and into the past.

Then the boy said, "Um, what?"

"It's...a local custom," said the young woman, her shoulders slumping slightly in defeat when it was clear that the slip of paper clearly wasn't going to do whatever she had been hoping it would, "a charm for keeping people safe and warding off evil."

The boy gingerly peeled the paper talisman off his head and turned it over to get a better look. It was painfully obvious that he had no idea how to read old Mistrali, because his eyes lit up despite the fact that most people would be offended at getting tagged with something that said ' _Evil Spirit Begone_ '. "Cool! Where'd you get it?"

"From a conman, apparently," the young woman muttered.

"Come again?"

"From a con...vent," she corrected.

"You went all the way to a convent for it? Wow. I...don't know what to say." His sheepish grin was like an arrow straight to her guilty conscience.

How was anyone this oblivious? He accepted all of her flimsy excuses at face value: first the disgusting ash and bone meal paste that he had let her smear all over his face under the pretext of holiday face paint, then the circle of salt and candles that he honestly thought was part of her dinner preparations, and even the blatantly obvious memorial tablet with his name carved on it that she told him was a souvenir paperweight.

Well, at least she didn't have to worry about hurting his feelings.

"It's just something I picked up on the way. They didn't even ask me to pay for it," she said.

In fact, the monk would probably have paid her to take it, given how panicked he had looked upon meeting her. ' _You have been touched by an ancient and terrifying power,_ ' he had told her as he pressed the talisman into her hands.

Since she couldn't exactly explain to him that she was a Maiden and that ancient and terrifying power was a mandatory part of the package, she had simply accepted the gift and carried on. It didn't occur to her until she ran into her only living-impaired acquaintance again that a talisman made by someone capable of sensing her Maiden powers might actually work on him.

Which, in hindsight, it didn't. Maybe the monk had just been bullshitting his sales pitch. Or maybe the talisman only worked on things that could be considered ancient and terrifying. The boy who was now diligently smoothing out the creases on the talisman against his knee was clearly far from ancient, and the only terrifying thing about him was his sheer obliviousness.

"You didn't ask me to pay for it either, so it all works out. Besides, free stuff should always be accepted with a grateful smile," said the boy. Then he cracked a rueful grin and added, "Or so Mom always tells me, but I think she might just want me to stop complaining about hand-me-downs."

She blinked. It was the first time he had ever mentioned his family. "You've got older siblings?"

"Oh, you have no idea. I've got seven sisters. _Seven_."

He looked so chagrined as he said it that a chuckle escaped her before she could stop herself.

"Sorry," she said, trying and failing to tamp down her smile.

He rolled his eyes.

"Laugh all you want, I don't mind. After everything they put me through? I'm _immune_ to embarrassment."

Still smiling, she asked, "Was it really that bad?"

"I have _seen_ things that can never be unseen," he intoned in the gravest, most dramatic voice he could manage, "I have _done_ things that can never be undone."

"Well, at least growing up must have been interesting."

"Yeah. _Interesting_ ," he echoed dryly.

They lapsed into a comfortable silence before they were interrupted by the sound of an foghorn and the sight of an airship descending from the clouds. The cavalry had finally arrived with impeccable timing - namely, long after the fighting was over and all the Grimm were nothing more than smears of ash.

"Well, that's our cue," she said, as the huntsmen descended on zip lines with paramedics and other rescue personnel in tow. The survivors gathered in the middle of town square let out a ragged cheer.

"You know, it wouldn't hurt to stick around and let them thank you, for once," he said as she swung herself up into the saddle of her horse.

"Not my style," she replied, "besides, I haven't done anything that deserves any thanking."

"What about saving all those people?"

"...not all of them," she said, forced to look away from him by the sudden onset of guilt, "not even close."

Then she felt a gentle tug on her elbow, forcing her to look back down and meet his gaze anyway.

"You're wrong. If not for you," he said, "all of those people would be...well, my list would be a lot longer. So if you won't stick around to let anyone else thank you properly, then _I'll_ say it."

His blue eyes were so bright with sincerity that they hurt to look at.

"Please don't- "

"Thanks," he said anyway.

She somehow managed to not burst into tears on the spot, but it was near thing. Guilt trips of this kind of magnitude should not be allowed, damn it, especially not from well-intentioned idiots who were too oblivious to even realize the amount of emotional terrorism they were committing.

"You're the last person who should be thanking me for anything," she managed to say despite the lump in her throat.

"Yeah, because all the people ahead of me are standing over there," he replied blithely, pointing over at the people who were being evacuated onto the airship.

"Please just...stop," she said.

He looked up at her, equal parts confused and concerned, before he let go of her sleeve and let out a small huff.

"Fine. Go ahead and do your whole 'lone ranger riding off into the sunset' routine. For the record, it's not as cool as you think is."

She bit down the half-laugh, half-sob that bubbled down in her throat. Not trusting her voice to say anything else with breaking, she instead pulled her hood low over her eyes and shortened the reins to spur her horse into a gallop, leaving the town and all its people behind.

No matter how fast she ran, though, her guilt would catch up with her. He always did.

. . .

It was a stupid plastic action figure that finally broke her.

"Um, what?" she asked.

"Well, I thought since you're a hero, you deserve a superhero of your own," he said.

She glanced dubiously at the gift he held aloft towards her. "So you got me a...toy?"

"It's not a _toy_ ," he said, sounding completely affronted, "It's the _limited edition_ , one-in-ten-thousand lottery prize that you can _only_ get from the fiftieth anniversary Pumpkin Pete's Marshmallow Flakes raffle event. 360 degree joint rotation. Fully detailed and detachable accessories. It even has a sound byte recorded by the _original_ voice actor."

He held up the superhero action figure and squeezed it around the waist to demonstrate.

" _You will pay for your crimes, you pompous, eyepatch-wearing, money-tossing wanker!_ " came the tinny sound of the voice recording.

She tried to hold it back. She truly did, but the laughter bubbled up in her throat so suddenly that it burst out of her as an incredibly unladylike snort before she could stop herself. Once the first laugh slipped past her guard, the rest spilled out of her like a river from a burst dam. The sheer ridiculousness of the clashing primary colors on the plastic, the hamminess of the voice acting, the chagrined look on his face as he watched her crumple - it was all just too much.

She laughed so hard that tears started rolling down her face.

It wasn't until she saw his chagrined expression slowly shift into worry and bewilderment that she realized she wasn't laughing anymore.

"Sorry. I don't know what came over me," she said, rubbing furiously at her cheeks.

This seemed to snap him out of his deer-in-headlights shock. He reached toward her, and then hesitated as he thought better of it. Nervously hovering at middle distance, he said, "No, it's...my bad? I'm really sorry - I'll get you different next time."

He was a good kid, she realized. A good kid who cared too much about the silliest things, who diligently collected box tops for cereal prizes, who wasn't ashamed to show off his action figures even though he was old enough that his friends must have made fun of him. An oblivious kind of kid who didn't even realize she'd been trying all sorts of ridiculous exorcisms on him for the past two years, who brought her all kinds of dumb impractical gifts like plastic superheroes because he honestly thought they were cool, who always seemed thrilled to hang out with her because he was so painfully, obviously lonely.

A good kid who wouldn't ever get a chance to grow up because of her.

He froze up stiff as a board as she reached out and hugged him as tightly as she could. As far as hugs went, it was a pretty shoddy one - he was all gangly limbs and bony angles, and being in such close proximity felt like diving into a frozen lake, he was so cold.

But in the most awkward, heart-warming way, he gingerly lifted his hand and patted her on the back.

"I'm sorry I didn't try hard enough," she finally confessed.

"That's...not true," he replied, somehow managing to sound both completely certain and completely confused at the same time, "You try harder than anyone else I've ever met. You're always doing everything you can to save people."

"Not everything," she murmured, "there's something I should have done a long time ago."

"Well...better late than never?"

After a long pause, she said quietly, "...you're right."

"Wait, really? That almost never happens."

She had been fooling herself with all those random exorcism rituals. She hadn't really believed any of them would work. They were all meant to banish malicious and evil things, ghouls and revenants and curses and the like, whereas he was completely and utterly harmless. Instead, he had been a friendly and familiar face, someone she could talk to without worrying about her secrets, a friend who ironically couldn't die, so she didn't need to worry about losing him as she had lost so many others. In a completely selfish way, she had wanted to keep him around.

"Jaune." She pulled him away to arms distance so that she could look him in the eye as she voiced the question she had never had the courage to ask him before now, "Why are you still here?"

"Well, I don't know if you noticed, but you're the one who grabbed me."

"No, I mean," she paused to search for the right words, "why haven't you moved on? Is there some kind of unfinished business that's tying you to me?"

He only looked even more confused, as well as slightly hurt. "I, well, I just thought we could hang out for a bit? But if you don't want me around, I can always just go away."

She stared at him. She thought back to all the things he had said about himself and about his family, and realization hit her like a train running very, very behind schedule.

A sick sort of feeling settled in her stomach, like the sort you got when you realized the yogurt you just had was actually milk, and the expiration date was two weeks ago. "You don't remember. All this time, you didn't know."

"Oh. Crap," he sighed, sounding resigned, "what'd I forget this time?"

There was probably a more tactful way to say it, but knowing how oblivious he was, it was probably best to be as blunt as possible.

"You died," she told him.

He jerked back in surprise. "What? No, I didn't. I'm pretty sure I would've been told."

"You don't have a shadow," she said, and his eyes widened in shock as he glanced down to see that it was true. "You don't have any body heat," she continued, and this was true as well. "And you haven't aged at all in the three years since we met," she finished. "You look _exactly_ the same every time."

He took a step back away from her.

"I...but He said it wasn't a job requirement," he said in a very small voice, "He wouldn't lie to me. Not about this."

"I'm sorry," she began, but he cut her off.

"You're wrong. You have to be," he said quietly, and there was no pretense of normalcy this time, nothing as cute as ducking behind a street sign or wayward tree. Instead, all the warmth was suddenly sucked out of the air, Time itself stuttered for a brief instant, and then he was gone. She was alone.

Every blade of grass in a four foot radius where he had stood suddenly crumbled into dust. So much for harmless.

With perfect dramatic timing, a dusty old crow that had been watching the entire scene from a nearby roof let out a surprised caw.

. . .

In the heyday of the gods, a prayer for deliverance had to be specific, detailing exactly which god you wanted doing the delivering, and exactly how the delivering ought to be done. Otherwise, anywhere between four and twelve hundred minor deities would show up and start yanking fabric of reality in four or twelve hundred different directions. In the second worst case scenario, they would cancel each other out and achieve a sum total of nothing. In the worst case scenario, they would tear a seam in the fabric of reality, and then things would get very strange for a while until one of the major gods noticed and came around to slap a plaster on it.

The heyday of the gods had long since passed though. It was the twilight of the gods now, the hour at which all reputable establishments started closing their shutters, where upstanding individuals went home to sleep, and only a few grandstanding stragglers insisted on hanging around before they were chased out by angry shop owners with brooms.

These days, any unspecified prayers for deliverance typically received answers from only one particular anthropomorphic personification, though He often sent a delivery boy instead.

Being a Maiden, however, meant that she was usually dispensing supernatural intervention rather than requesting it. So when the stray thought, ' _Gods, can't I get even half a second to catch my breath'_ had crossed her mind after the third hour of trying to keep Grimm from overrunning her umpteenth village-in-peril, she hadn't meant it as a prayer of any sort, nor had she expected anyone to answer it.

She certainly hadn't expected the answer to be a flash of unearthly purple light that washed over the entire battlefield.

The lightning bolts she summoned froze in midair. The roars of the oncoming horde shorted out like someone had accidentally yanked the headphones out of reality. The only things that stayed in motion were her own body, and the familiar boy who suddenly appeared out of thin air right in the path of her fist.

"Am - grk!"

She pulled her punch, but not quickly enough to keep it from introducing itself to his face. In hindsight, it was a very good thing that she had been too tired to continue throwing punches wreathed in fire and lightning. Rather than having his head exploded into barbeque bits, he was only sent stumbling backwards.

"Shit, sorry!" she said reflexively.

He was still bent over and clutching his face, but managed to mumble past his hand in a pained, muffled voice, "'s okay, my own fault for showing up out of nowhere."

"Are you okay?" she asked anyway.

"Yeah, don't worry about it," he said, straightening. His nose was red and there were a few glimmers of tears in the corners of his eyes, but he otherwise seemed no worse for the wear. This was more than most people could claim after taking a punch to face from a fully empowered Maiden.

"So then...are you the one doing this?" She gestured vaguely at all the Grimm frozen in various states of discord and dismemberment around them. It was eerie to see them all frozen in impossible ways, from the ones floating in midair to a particularly unfortunate Beringel that was currently mid-sizzle in a bolt of lightning.

"Oh. That." His gaze dropped to his feet as he said, "Yeah. I needed to talk to you. Just...trying to figure out how to say it."

"It couldn't wait until after this fight?" she asked.

He continued staring at the ground for a few moments without answering. Just when she was about to ask him what was wrong, he said, "That'd be too late."

"What do you mean?"

He swallowed audibly and said, "You know what you told me last time? How I might be dead? Well, I looking for something that would tell me for sure. But I found yours first." He finally raised his other hand, and for the first time, she noticed that he had a chain wound around his palm. Attached to that chain was an hourglass with her name on it.

"I take it that's not just a nifty souvenir."

His shoulders slumped slightly. "No. It's a lifetimer. It, well, it times lives."

She squinted at her supposed lifetimer. The top bulb was nearly completely empty, save for a tiny pinch of sand at the mouth of the funnel. It was frozen in place, like the rest of the world, but just looking at the tiny amount of remaining sand filled her with a cold, deep sense of dread.

Her throat was suddenly very dry. "How much time does it say I have left?"

"Hours. Maybe minutes," he said, "I...don't think you make it out of this fight."

She looked away from him and at the seemingly endless horde of Grimm surrounding them. His words were frighteningly easy to believe. And yet, at the same time, she was confident that she could conquer this. Her aura was recovering. She had managed to catch her breath. Surely, as long as she was careful - "I don't believe that. I can't believe that an hourglass can determine when and where I die, not while I still have the power of Choice."

As if beckoned, the powers of the Fall Maiden resurged through her veins, humming just under the surface of her skin.

She looked back towards him, but to her surprise, she failed to spot him, even though she knew he had been standing there just a moment earlier. She tried to glare at the spot where he stood, but her gaze kept sliding to the left or the right. She felt a flicker of worry prickle in her gut. If she was truly facing a life or death battle, surely he wouldn't leave without saying goodbye?

And then just as suddenly as he had vanished, he was present once again.

"I know it's hard to believe," he said, oblivious to his own spontaneous disappearance, "but you have to trust me. You have to get out of here."

Still somewhat thrown by his inexplicable disappearance and subsequent reappearance, she asked, "Where would I even go? It's not like you can keep time stopped forever."

"Not here, no. But there _is_ somewhere you can go," he said, his eyes brightening as he spoke faster, "You mentioned that I haven't changed at all in three years, right? That's because for me, it hasn't _been_ three years. It's just been like...a day that was three years long."

"...wouldn't that still be the same amount of time?"

"Okay, I realize that was a crap explanation, but I promise it'll make way more sense when you see it for yourself." He extended his hand towards her.

She didn't take it.

"See what for myself?" she asked.

"The place I'm taking you," he said, turning his palm upwards insistently. "As long as you're there, Time won't pass, and your lifetimer won't run out. My mentor said you could stay over as long as you need to."

His eyes were so bright, so hopeful, that she was tempted to take his hand, questions be damned.

But at the same time, a slow and gradual realization had been taking shape in the back of her mind. Missing pieces being added to a puzzle that she thought she had already solved, changing the picture to something else entirely. There was a question that needed asking, even if she already had an inkling of what the answer might be.

She said slowly, "Who's this mentor of yours?"

He cringed. "Well, he goes by a lot of different names and titles."

" _Jaune._ "

"...Death," he confessed, "I'm apprenticed to Death."

She took a deep breath to calm herself. And then took another, because one deep breath was nowhere near enough to deal with this. But she didn't need to be calm to give him her answer.

"I can't go with you," she said.

"Wait, I promise he's not as bad as people make him out to be!"

"That's not why," she said, before looking him straight in the eye. "You've been able to tell me where the survivors are in every village before now. Is that part of being Death's apprentice?"

He nodded very hesitantly.

"Are there any survivors here?" she asked.

He didn't answer.

"Are there any survivors here?" she repeated, more forcefully this time.

"...yes," he said.

"What happens to them if I go with you?"

"They'll probably be fine. Their time's not up yet," he hedged.

"So the Grimm will magically leave them alone?" she asked.

"I don't know, okay?" he said, his voice rising, "I just know that if you stay, you're _going to die_."

"And how is your solution any better?" she asked flatly, "if you really think that the amount of sand in that hourglass is an absolute sign of when someone dies, then I can never come back. You're asking me to give up everything. Trapped forever in Death's realm; how is that any different from being dead?"

"I...It would - there'd be some way - we could figure it out..." he stuttered and stumbled over his words, never quite managing a complete thought before trailing into silence. Then, in the smallest possible voice, he said, "...at least you'd still be around. I don't want you to be gone."

"I'll still be here," she declared.

The certainty in her tone seemed to catch him off guard, as he just blinked at her in confusion. She tightened her grip on her staff and planted it in the dirt, raising her chin and planting her feet in defiance. Maybe, if he had never shown up and never stopped time, she would have died. But she could already feel her aura returning, fueled by her own determination. She was a Maiden; she had been gifted with these powers to defy impossible odds for the sake of others.

Besides, she had a very dear friend who had gone to such great lengths to help her - he had stopped time for her, and even warned her. If that wasn't enough to change fate, then nothing was.

Her confidence rising, she continued, "You might believe that destiny is set in stone, but I don't. As long as we're alive, we have the power to choose. That's what'll determine who lives or dies, not some mystical hourglass. Running away won't solve anything. The only way forward is to _fight_."

His eyes widened as her words began to sink in.

"Amber, you can't - "

"I refuse to die here," she said with finality, but then she heard a 'pop', like a cork coming out of a bottle.

She was quite suddenly alone.

"Jaune?" she murmured, once again caught off guard by his sudden disappearance. Unlike the last time, however, he did not reappear.

Instead, she was nearly deafened by the sound of a thousand howling Grimm bursting back into motion, and she was nearly decapitated by the Beringel she had been fighting before Jaune's visit. Whatever power had kept them safely ensconced in a bubble of frozen time had apparently run out, and in her mind's eye, she could all too easily imagine that tiny pinch of sand quickly draining down the funnel of her hourglass.

Any Grimm that approached her was swiftly reduced to ash. She flew through them like a shuttle through a loom, trailing lightning and fire as she went. There was no doubt in her mind that she could conquer this challenge. She was made for this. She was trained for this. Her only enemy was her own complacency, and she had never been more vigilant than she was now.

When she finally stopped to catch her breath again, the very last Grimm was dissolving to ash under her feet.

She had survived.

' _Fate can be changed,_ ' she exulted in her mind, but when she looked around for her scraggly blonde friend so she could tell him so, he was nowhere to be found.

' _Well, I guess I'll see him in the next village,_ ' Amber thought to herself, ' _and then I can tell him 'Thanks'._ '

She paused, then added with a faint smile, ' _And 'Told ya so._ '

Exhausted, but triumphant, she slowly spurred her horse forward, trotting out of one town towards the next just has she had done countless times before, and probably would countless more times to come.

Then she saw a little green-haired girl at the side of the road.

. . .

The random bolts of lightning and the sudden sheet of hoarfrost that crackled over everything in sight were probably just side effects of forcibly extracting the powers of the Fall Maiden. It had never been done before, so of course there were still a few kinks in the procedure that needed to be ironed out.

Even when the enemy huntsman dashed in, severing the connection and making off with the former Fall Maiden, the situation was still mostly under control. The enemy huntsman was a known factor, one they had foreseen and planned accordingly for, and it wasn't like he could pursue them while burdened with a corpse, nor would he be able to identify them through Emerald's illusions.

But then a pair of unseen hands closed around her throat, so cold that even the fires summoned through the Maiden's powers guttered out before they could manifest. The icy hands squeezed with inhuman strength. And at that moment, Cinder Fall knew something had gone horribly awry.

There was a deafening crack.

Fortunately - or perhaps unfortunately depending on your point of view - it was not her neck. As quickly as it had appeared, the hoarfrost disappeared. The thundering skies fell silent. The deathly vice around her neck vanished into thin air and the suffocating sense of doom in the air dissipated as if it had never been there at all.

She fell to one knee, gasping for air, before she felt Mercury pulling her to her feet and glimpsed Emerald turning the full force of her Semblance on the enemy huntsman to cover their retreat. By then, the shock was quickly wearing off and just as quickly being replaced by a towering fury. How dare they lay a hand on her. How dare they challenge her newfound power. When she found out who was responsible - and she _would_ find out - she would take great pleasure in teaching them the error of their ways.

It would not be until much later, when she took a closer look at the marks burned into her neck by the intense cold, that a flicker of doubt took root in the deepest recesses of her mind. The outlines of both hands were clear as could be, ten invisible phalanges that had been wrapped around her throat, too large to be a child's and too small to be an adult's.

Ten _skeletal_ phalanges that had been wrapped around her throat.

For just a fleeting moment, Cinder Fall wondered if it wasn't a ' _who_ ' that had attacked her, but a ' _what_ '.

. . .

For every fairytale that is still told, there are dozens that are forgotten, and hundreds more that are never told at all. This is one of the latter, but it is no more and no less true than any of its fellow tales. In other words, it should be downed with the judicious application of a fist-sized grain of salt.

 _"Once upon a time, there was a Maiden. She was fair and she was kind, but above all, she was gallant, for a wise wizard had blessed her with great power, and she wielded that power to defend the weak and rescue the damned. Far and wide she roamed, fighting many battles and saving many lives._

 _She saved so many that Death himself took notice, but as it was not yet her Time, he sought her out in a guise of a farmer. He came to her and asked, "Why do you rob Death of his due?"_

 _The Maiden looked Death in the eye and said, "A good farmer cares for his crops; reap a harvest before it is full and there shall be no seeds for the next."_

 _And Death saw that she spoke wisely, so he stayed his scythe._

 _The Maiden continued her journey, and saved even more lives with her great power. And Death came to her again, in the guise of a hunter, for it was still not yet her Time. He asked again, "Why do you rob Death of his due?"_

 _The Maiden looked Death in the eye once more and said, "A good hunter cares for his prey; slay a calf before it is grown and there shall be no more calves."_

 _And Death saw that she spoke wisely, so once again he stayed his scythe._

 _Once more the Maiden journeyed, and once more she saved many lives. And Death came to her in the guise of a boy, and he asked her simply, "Why?"_

 _The Maiden looked Death in the eye a third time and smiled. She said, "Find something you truly care for, then you will understand."_

 _And Death, who had never truly cared for anything, looked upon the Maiden, and at last, he understood. For a third time, he stayed his scythe, and never again begrudged her the lives that she snatched from his grasp._

 _Yet, in the end, the Maiden's kindness and gallantry was her own undoing, for the evil she battled set a cruel trap and struck her down through deceit. Death, sensing that the Maiden had fallen, descended upon her enemies in a terrible rage. His fury blotted out the skies and his rage sundered the earth. Yet for all his might, Death could not restore what was lost, for it was not in his nature. So for the fourth and final time, Death came to the Maiden. He came as he truly was, for at last, her Time had come._

 _Death knelt beside her and begged, "Come with me. Time itself dares not tread in my Domain, and your final moment will never come to pass."_

 _At last, the Maiden looked Death in the eye, and saw in them the same eyes of the farmer, the hunter, and the boy. With her final breath, she said, "If you truly care for me, then let me go."_

 _But Death could not bring himself to swing his scythe and reap away her soul. Instead, he transformed the Maiden into a piece of silver, as bright and untarnished as her heart had been. He bade a passing crow to carry her far, far away, to hide her somewhere even Death could not reach. For while his duty compelled him to seek his due, he could not bear the thought of destroying her._

 _To this day, Death remembers his lost Maiden. If the crops are failing, bury a piece of silver in the field, and Death will remember that a good farmer waits until the harvest is full. If a child is ill, place a piece of silver around their neck, and Death will remember that a good hunter does not slay calves. And if a loved one is beyond saving and in pain, place a piece of silver over their heart._

 _Death will know that you are ready to let them go."_

 _. . ._

A boy waited at the edge of a desert. He had been waiting for what felt like a very long time, though it was impossible to tell exactly how much time had passed when Time had never passed through at all.

After an indeterminate amount of waiting, there was a hooded figure standing next to him. It was hard make out the figure's black robes against the grey-black sands and dark mountains in the distance, but thankfully, he carried a scythe with a polished blade that glowed blue all on its own.

The boy didn't bother looking up at the figure. Instead, he buried his face further into his arms and mumbled, "She never showed up."

NOT EVERYONE CAN MAKE IT HERE ON THEIR OWN.

"But she's already..."

THAT, said the figure, IS THE PROBLEM WITH THESE HUNTSMEN TYPES. THEY NEVER CONSIDER THAT JAILBREAKING THEIR SOUL VOIDS THE WARRANTY. THOSE THINGS ARE LOCKED FOR A REASON.

"What happens to them then?"

MORE WORK.

The boy made a quiet huffing sound that might have been a laugh if he had bothered put any actual cheer into it. Together, boy and hooded figure waited on the edge of the desert in a lapse of companionable silence, before the boy stood up.

"I'll go find her," he said.

YOU CANNOT, the figure intoned.

"What, why not?"

BECAUSE YOU CANNOT INTERFERE IN MORTAL SHENANIGANS, said the figure, NOT AS YOU ARE NOW.

"Oh," said the boy. He glanced down at his hands. They flickered, briefly revealing the alabaster bones housed within the morphological illusion of flesh, as he closed them tightly into fists. He stared at them for a moment before saying, "But I have to. She's my friend."

The figure let out a rattling sigh.

I FIGURED AS MUCH, said the figure, before reaching into one of his sleeves. There was quiet clink, then the figure withdrew his hand with a chain wrapped around his bony palm. Attached to that chain was an hourglass, filled with grey-black sand that looked like it had been scooped right out of the grey-black desert in front of them. Inscribed upon the top rim was a name.

"You found it," the boy exclaimed, staring at the hourglass in surprise. "Where was it? I could've sworn I searched the whole room."

WRONG ROOM, said the figure simply. In the meantime, he set the hourglass on his upturned palm, where it became clear to both of them that the sand inside was holding perfectly still. Fixing his inhuman blue orbs on the boy's, the figure said, THERE IS WAY. AND THERE IS ALSO, AS ALWAYS, A PRICE.

The boy squared his shoulders and met the figure's gaze unwaveringly. "I'll pay it. I'm the one who screwed up in the first place. I should be the one to fix it."

This time, the figure let out a quiet huffing sound that might have been a laugh if he had actual lungs to laugh with.

VERY WELL, said the figure as he tapped the top of the hourglass with his bony index finger. Immediately, the frozen sand began to flow impossibly quickly, breaking several laws of physics dictating that so much sand should not be able to pass through so little space in so little time.

The boy looked confused for a moment, glancing around and digging a finger in his ear as if to clear it. "Wait, what's that rushing sound?"

THAT IS THE SOUND OF FOUR YEARS OF PUBERTY. I HEAR FLESHY MORTALS FIND IT RATHER UNPLEASANT.

"Oh," said the boy.

Then his eyes widened.

"Oh fu-!"

Then it hit him, all at once, and the resulting scream might have been manlier sounding if his voice hadn't cracked right in the middle of it.

. . .


	5. Chapter 06

**AUTHOR'S NOTE** : (12/9/2017) Old chapter, posted before I wrote the current chapters two, three, and four. If you've read this before, the update is for chapter four, which comes before this. We've got one more interlude chapter to go before updates should resume as usual. That being said, I will probably make some major revisions to this chapter, since in hindsight, it's just not very good.

. . .

 ** _Chapter Six_**

 _In Which Your First Day of School Never Goes Well_

. . .

The landing bay of Beacon Academy was always a busy place, given the sheer number of people and things that needed to be shipped back and forth in order to keep the place functional, but it was even busier than usual today. Freed from the cruel yoke of their end-of-term examinations, many Academy students poured into Vale, where the usual goods and services found in the city could now be purchased for twice the usual price under the glorious banner of the Vytal Festival.

In the spirit of maintaining some sort of population equilibrium, tourists poured in the opposite direction, wielding their cameras and autograph books with such skillful aplomb that even the most wary students found themselves blinded the occasional photo flash or accosted by uncapped ballpoint pens shoved precariously close to their nostrils. You never knew which huntsman-in-training would wind up becoming incredibly famous, after all, and it was best to acquire as many photographs and signatures as you could as early as possible. An early vintage year added an entire zero at the end of the resale price.

The tourists who had chosen to visit on this particular afternoon encountered an even greater windfall than usual. Upon pouring out of the poor, overworked airships, taking a moment to boggle at the majesty of the Academy's architecture, and then finally taking a look around, which was the point at which most of them spotted an iconic red ponytail that fluttered in the wind like a flag.

The comparison was fairly apt, given that a red flag meant that no mercy, and said ponytail belonged to one of the few huntsmen-in-training who was _already_ famous, and likely to become even more famous before all was said and done. The tourists swarmed like a band of bloodthirsty pirates.

Needless to say, Pyrrha Nikos quickly found herself up to her armpits in camera flashes and dangerously pointy pens. It was a wonder no one lost an eye in the hullabaloo.

Faced with an unending tide of tourists demanding pictures and autographs - and even a few unscrupulous individuals who tried to shear off a piece of her hair or clothing - a less enduring individual would probably have started stabbing people to death with a misappropriated pen or thrown themselves off the top of Beacon cliff. Pyrrha, however, had the unfortunate combination of being the sort of person who was overly concerned with living up to other people's expectations, as well as being the sort of person who inspired increasingly unreasonable expectations to live up to. These sorts of people usually went in one of two directions: they were either wildly successful, or wound up in a padded box before they turned thirty.

Given the choice, Pyrrha might have opted for the padded box after the four-hundred and nineteenth autograph and the two-hundred and fourth family that gathered around her for a commemorative photo. Worst of all, there was no escape, because she still hadn't found the person she had been waiting for in the first place.

' _I wonder if he missed his flight,_ ' she thought to herself, sending another tragic look across the landing bay.

There were several young men of approximately the right age, but none were quite the right mix of 'tall, blonde, and scraggly'.

Even if she had somehow failed to spot him, he would have to be blinder than a mole - and living under a rock like one - to overlook the six-foot-tall celebrity red-head in shining golden armor standing at the nucleus of a tourist vortex that was quickly approaching critical mass. Her visibility was the main reason why Headmaster Ozpin had sent her to greet their new teammate in the first place.

Well, that, and the fact that her other teammates could be crossed off the list by process of elimination. Ren had probably spoken less than a hundred words over the course of the entire semester, and Nora...Nora would probably break something. Likely their new teammate. Or worse, Nora would get their new teammate to _help_ her break something, most likely the foolhardy sightseers who lacked the self-preservation to steer clear of her.

Pyrrha discreetly double-checked the transcript she had pulled up on her scroll. The profile picture of 'Jaune Arc' looked back up at her.

He certainly didn't look like the sort of seasoned fighter his transcripts made him out to be. For someone who had been wandering through deadly Grimm-infested battlefields for four entire years, he looked, well, _normal_ , for lack of better words. He even seemed a bit embarrassed of himself, in a way that reminded Pyrrha more of a puppy that had tripped over its own feet far more than a lone wolf that had decided to strike out on its own rather than attend combat school like most other kids.

Then again, the young man in the photograph had also, without any hint of sarcasm, jotted down 'DEATH' as his current employer on official paperwork. This implied that appearances could be horribly misleading. It also implied that her future partner was at least a few marbles short of a full bag. This was not a particularly comforting thought.

' _I suppose I only have myself to blame,_ ' Pyrrha thought sadly. If she had been anyone else, then being one man down would simply have disqualified her team from the tournament. Instead, the school was forced to scrounge up a replacement member, because the Vytal Tournament sponsors might have collective heart attacks if Pyrrha Nikos was barred from competing on a technicality.

This left the problem of where to find a fourth member who was not already an enrolled student, but still skilled enough to fight evenly with the top students of the four elite Huntsmen Academies. It was a wonder they had found anyone at all. She supposed she ought to feel grateful.

Pyrrha sighed, ' _At least he can't possibly be worse than Winchester._ '

Then she immediately felt bad, partly because it wasn't nice to think so uncharitably about someone, and partly because she regretted even thinking the words 'can't', 'possibly', 'be', and 'worse' in that particular order. Tempting Fate was never a good idea when your profession revolved around intervening when things got worse.

She held her breath for a moment, half expecting her newest teammate to introduce himself in the most repulsive way possible at that very moment.

Fortunately, Fate seemed to have mercy on the poor girl. Or perhaps not, because the tide of tourists, which seemed to redouble its efforts to swarm her, was arguably worse. Pyrrha found that even her patience was beginning to fray under the strain.

Still no sign of a scruffy blonde head anywhere in the sea of bobbing fans. At the same time, a particularly bulbous looking man was beginning to encroach upon her with a poorly concealed pair of scissors in his sleeve.

' _I think it...may be time to call for a tactical retreat,_ ' Pyrrha thought reasonably, and with smiles and polite words, fled the scene.

She barely made it across the courtyard when the window above her exploded.

. . .

The sequence of events that led to the cruel murder of a Beacon Academy window began about thirty minutes prior, while Pyrrha had still been stalwartly fending off fans while waiting for her partner at the landing bay.

Her vigil, however, was pointless, because her new partner didn't arrive on an airship. He didn't arrive by the air at all.

In fact, the only one who saw his actual arrival was Ruby Rose, who had been returning from a trip to Vale with the rest of her team when suddenly, a bolt of lightning struck the ground in front of her. On a clear day. While they were indoors.

There were questions she would have normally asked when confronted by spontaneous indoor lightning - namely, ' _Which unfortunate soul got on Nora Valkyrie's bad side?_ ' - but they were momentarily placed on hold because a rearing white horse appeared out of nowhere right after the thunderbolt to the ominous tolling of a funeral bell. The entire hallway seemed to darken, as if the light had been sucked right out of it, illuminated only by the brilliant blue flames that trailed the horse's hooves as it reared in the air. A chill fog of death seemed to roll off its flanks as it charged down the hallway in a dead gallop.

The sense of portentous doom was a bit dampened, however, by the rider clinging to the horse's neck, squawking like an abused chew toy the entire time.

The squawks sounded vaguely like, "Milly, ulp, stop, stop, _stoooooop_!"

They were also cut short as the horse came to an abrupt halt that sent its rider flying off its back and into a janitorial closet at the end of the hall. The hapless rider sailed into the door, or rather, he sailed through the door, as if it wasn't even there. His strange incorporeal state seemed to wear off at that point, because his disappearance into the closet was followed by a cacophony of various heavy cleaning supplies crashing onto of a hapless body. The horse snorted, pawed the ground once, and then disappeared in another crackle of lightning.

After a few moments of shocked silence, Ruby said, "Uh...what."

The rest of her teammates looked back at her.

"What's wrong?" her older sister asked, "Didja lose something?"

Ruby pointed in the direction of the janitorial closet. Incredulously, she asked, "Seriously? Did no one else see that?"

The rest of her team turned to observe the janitorial closet, which was now making various clattering noises with the occasional moan.

"Ooooooh," Yang said, a mischievous grin spreading over her lips, "Celebrating the start of a new semester in a closet next to a busy hallway? Kinky."

The clattering sounds stopped, and the doorknob rattled. Then rattled again. There was a pause, followed by frantic, rhythmic pounding against the door as whoever was inside desperately tried to get out.

Weiss turned red to the tips of her ears and spluttered, "Of all the disgusting, indecent things - Ruby, you dolt, _don't open it!_ "

It was too late, and the Schnee heiress immediately covered her own eyes to spare herself from having the sight of things she most definitely did not want to see burned into her retinas, but instead of an amorous couple, only a single person spilled out into the hallway in a mess of mops and gangly limbs.

Before anyone could say a word, said person hurtled past Ruby in a beeline for the nearest trashcan.

"Bleargh," greeted the hunched over figure, as he announced his august arrival to the hallowed halls of Beacon Academy by emptying his guts into the nearest waste receptacle.

Yang pulled a face as the wet sounds of enthusiastic upchucking filled the hallway. "Okay, I'm not going within ten feet of that." As if the emphasize her point, she pointedly took two large steps to the far side of the hallway before continuing towards down it.

"Revolting," Weiss said, still scandalized. "Who let this - this reprobate in here?"

"Why do you keep calling people that?" Blake asked, seemingly offended. "It's not like you even know him."

Weiss immediately bristled. Blake bristled right back. At this point, they would have stomped off in opposite directions if not for the fact that they were going towards the same place. Instead, they settled for coldly ignoring each other as they proceeded down the hall in frosty silence.

Ruby, however, lingered behind her teammates. Part of it was out of friendly concern, and part of it was curiosity, because it wasn't every day that you saw a horse appear out of thin air and toss someone into a cleaning closet. She skirted around the stained patch of floor and kneeled next to the boy hugging the wastebasket for dear life, asking kindly, "Um, are you gonna be okay?"

The boy dry heaved once more before sliding bonelessly down along the wall next to the bins.

"Urgh, I feel I took a trip to hell and back," he groaned. "Which, now that I actually think about it, is a distressingly accurate summary of what happened."

"You mean the lightning, and the horsey, and the whole going through walls thing?"

The boy's head immediately swiveled towards her in surprise.

"Wait, you saw that?"

"It was kind of hard to miss. Beacon's weird, but not that weird." Ruby scratched the side of her cheek awkwardly. She might be stretching the truth a bit, because Beacon might, in fact, be exactly that weird. Just weird in different ways.

"Well, that's actually, uh, you see, there's a, ah, perfectly good explanation for that which I will, er, I will tell you. As soon as...I remember what it was." He paused dramatically for a few moments, but when no explanation was forthcoming, he groaned a second time and dropped his head in his hands, mumbling, "On second thought, can you please just pretend that never happened? It'd be kinda pathetic even for me if I blew my cover before I even set foot in this school."

Ruby blinked, confused for a moment before the puzzle pieces clicked together in her head.

"Oh! You're keeping your semblance a secret for the tournament! That's pretty smart!"

The boy opened his mouth. Then closed it again. He stared at her for a few uncomfortable moments before stammering, "Y-yeah. Sure. Let's go with that."

"Don't worry, your secret is safe with me," Ruby chirped, thumping a fist against her chest. She was great at keeping secrets. Except that one time. And that other time. And - actually, never mind all those times. They didn't count. She was great at keeping secrets! Holding out a hand to help him up, she said, "I'm Ruby, by the way. Ruby Rose."

"Jaune Arc," the boy said, gratefully letting her pull him onto his feet, "Say, do you know where I can find someone named, uh, Pyrrha? Pyrrha Nikos?"

"Wait," Ruby paused, eyeing Jaune suspiciously, "You're not one of those creepy stalkers, are you?"

His eyes boggled for a moment before he cried, "What? No! Why on earth would you think that?" He glanced down at himself worriedly and said, "Wait, do I look like a creepy stalker? Oh no, it's the hoodie, isn't it? Stalkers in the movies always wear creepy hoodies." He clutched despairingly at said article of clothing.

It was emblazoned with a cute little bunny rabbit. Somehow, Ruby didn't think it fit the bill for creepy stalking attire.

"No, no, you're fine. Not stalker-ish at all," she reassured him apologetically. "It's just that she has a lot of those. Uh, stalkers, not hoodies. Famous people always get stalked."

He now looked thoroughly confused before digging a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and squinting at it.

"Wait, are we talking about the same Pyrrha Nikos? Red-hair, green-eyes, weirdly fashionable head gear? I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be placed on the same team as anyone famous."

"Only one Pyrrha Nikos at Beacon, as far as I know," Ruby said, shrugging.

"Huh. Weird."

They walked a few more paces down the hall before a few stray puzzle pieces finally clicked together in Ruby's mind.

"Wait, that means you're the new transfer student! The one that the whole school is talking about!" She levelled an accusing finger at him.

He whirled to look over his shoulder, and upon finding no one behind him, remembered that he was, in fact, the transfer student in question.

"Oh, yeah. I guess I am. Hi. Jaune Arc. Nice to meet you. Again. Since we've, uh, already met." He let out a nervous laugh and rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly.

Ruby took a step back to size him up. She had heard a lot of things about the new transfer student - the one who, unlike most other transfers, hadn't been a student at any of the other academies. No, he was way cooler. He travelled outside the kingdoms, fighting real monsters! The wilds were his teacher! Instinct was his guide! He was eight feet tall! He had a bazillion scars and a missing eye! His weapon was forged from a fallen star and sharpened on a moonbeam! He travelled through shadow and storm, following on the heels of Death!

Okay, so maybe the last few had been a little too far-fetched, but the rest had sounded half-believable.

Jaune didn't look very wild though. He wasn't eight feet tall either. Both of his intact blue eyes blinked down at her in confusion, and she didn't see any scars. All in all, he was the type of guy she'd expect to meet in a comic book shop, not in the deadly, Grimm-infested wilds of Remnant.

"Is there, uh, is there something on my face?" he asked, shifting uncomfortably under her stare.

She patted him reassuringly on the shoulder, saying, "It's okay, Jaune. I still think you're pretty cool."

"Uh...thanks?" he said, still as confused as ever. He coughed, then clasped his hands together and gracelessly changed the subject, "So, any chance you could point me in the direction of Pyrrha Nikos? I actually was supposed to meet up with her a while ago, but there were some, er, some last minute changes in travel plans."

Ruby looked thoughtful for a moment.

"I think I saw her down at the landing bay, though I don't think she's still there," Ruby said, recalling the dire straits they had last seen their fellow huntress in. Unbeknownst to Ruby, Pyrrha Nikos was, indeed, still at the landing bay, in even more dire straits than before. She also sneezed at that exact moment, ruining the one-hundred and fifty-fourth commemorative photo she had taken that day.

"I can take you to PRN's room instead though," Ruby said cheerfully.

Jaune choked on air.

" _W-What_?"

"Every team at Beacon has their own dorm room. Pyrrha's the leader of team P-R-W-N," Ruby patiently explained, "But since they lost a member, they're just team P-R-N now."

"Oh," Jaune said, sounding incredibly relieved for some reason. Then, somewhat nervously, he asked, "What happened to the 'W' guy?"

"Oh, um," Ruby looked a little awkward as she shuffled her feet a little, "He made one of the upperclassmen really mad, and she...sort of...broke him. But only a little bit! And they said he'll get full use of his legs back in a couple months, once they finished replacing his femurs, so no lasting harm, right?"

"Aha. Ha. Ha, ha, yeah. Sure," Jaune forced a laugh that came out several pitches higher his normal voice, "No lasting harm."

Ruby let out a small laugh as well, relieved that she managed to assuage his concerns. They walked a few more steps down the hall before Ruby broke out her official meeting-new-people question.

"So...what kind of weapon do you use?"

. . .

"No, no, it's...nice," Ruby's voice came from outside the room, "and besides, it's not the size that matters, it's how you use it."

Yang, who had been slowly driven into a nearly brain dead state of catatonia by her other two teammates' angry bickering, suddenly perked up at the sound of her baby sister making either very poor word choices or very poor life choices. Either way, sisterly intervention was called for.

"You're just saying that to make me feel better, aren't you?" said a rather plaintive sounding, but also unmistakably male voice.

 _Immediate_ sisterly intervention.

"What? No, haha, what gave you that idea? Scythes are awesome. We can totally be scythe buddies. Even if yours is, um, fun-sized! Yeah! Scythe buddies for the win!" Ah, never mind, false alarm. Of course Ruby would default to the most unfortunate wording possible whenever she started talking about weapons. Yang relaxed her fingers from the trigger mechanism of Ember Celica and opened the door to the hallway in a slightly less 'murder-first-ask-questions-later' state of mind.

"Sup, Rubes," Yang said, popping her head through the doorframe, "What took you so long?" She glanced over Ruby's shoulder and saw a tall, blonde and scraggly guy who could only be the same poor soul they had met in the hallway. Raising an eyebrow, Yang asked, "And why'd you bring vomit boy along?"

"It's Jaune. Jaune Arc," the boy in question deadpanned. He already had a sinking feeling that the nickname would stick.

"He's team PRN's new teammate," Ruby answered. "Jaune, this is Yang, my sister."

"Nice to meet ya. Yang's the name, Xiao Long's the same. Though, Ruby, you really need to stop pronouncing P-R-N that way," Yang said. Ruby looked somewhat mystified, but her baby sister's introduction to the strange and mysterious concept of porn could wait until another day. Besides, Weiss was getting closer to cracking every time Ruby said it, and Yang wanted to see the fallout when the heiress gave in. She already had the popcorn ready. And a camera. Some blackmail opportunities were too good to pass up.

But that was neither here nor now.

Jaune wilted under the gorgeous blonde girl's critical gaze. Somehow, Yang's scrutiny was much more alarming than Ruby's guileless curiosity. It certainly didn't help that, as she apparently made up her mind about him, she grinned widely enough to show off a glimpse of all too wolfish-looking canines.

"Well, what're we waiting for? Let's go introduce him to his new team," said Yang, sliding right past both Ruby and Jaune to rap sharply on the door across the hall.

At first, nothing happened.

Then the door opened with an ominous creak, revealing a short ginger-haired girl holding a frying pan. This would normally have been a rather pleasant sight, but the stray sparks leaping off the girl's skin and the thunderous gleam in her eye made her smile decidedly less friendly-looking and considerably more deranged.

"Pancake Time is for team members _only_ ," she growled.

Jaune made the sound of a small cat being stepped on and tried to somehow hide behind Ruby, despite the logistical impossibility of concealing his 6'1" frame behind her much slighter 5'2". Even if he had somehow been able to pull it off, it would have been in vain, because Yang mercilessly dragged him to the forefront by his elbow.

The blonde demoness in disguise said cheerfully, "That's exactly why we're here. Nora, meet your new teammate, vomit boy!"

"It's Jaune," he protested weakly.

There was a tense moment as Jaune found himself the object of female scrutiny for the third time today. Sadly, none of it was the type of scrutiny a teenage boy might enjoy, no matter how objectively pretty the scrutinizers might be. He had learned the hard way from having seven sisters that sweet smiles and kind words were really just a promise of future suffering.

Fortunately - or perhaps unfortunately considering what happened later - a calmer voice interrupted them before Nora could make up her mind on whether or not Jaune was a worthy human sacrifice to the pancake gods.

"Nora? Did you take the frying pan?" said an attractive, dark-haired young man wearing a lovely pink apron that rather nicely brought out the color of his eyes.

All sense of impending doom dissipated like scattering clouds as Nora spun around on her heel and brandished the pan in question, saying, "I got it! And look what else I got, Ren!" Jaune found himself dragged into the room by a grip stronger than iron. This was not, as usual, a metaphor; he could literally feel his bones threatening to splinter under the casual pressure Nora's hand was exerting on his arm.

"It's Pyrrha's new partner!" she announced with a grand gesture, "and you know what that means!"

"Nora, I don't think…" the pink-eyed boy began.

"We gotta put him through a secret test of character!" Nora trucked on, full steam ahead, "except, not secret, because I just said it out loud, but we'll just make it harder to make up for the fact that he already knows about it, which is even better because he's going to be Pyrrha's new partner and our new teammate and we wouldn't want a repeat of the last time we let someone not awesome onto our team so we should think of something really hard that he has to do to get in like catching a sloth or making pancakes or, wait, I've got it, he should totally go get some coffee for us, we need coffee and he needs a challenge so it's _PERFECT_!"

"Uh," said Jaune, making a stunningly intelligent and eloquent response. She had been speaking so quickly towards the end that he only caught every other word.

Ruby let out a small gasp of shock, "You don't mean...the super-duper-whooper coffee?"

The other boy - Ren - looked thoughtful for a moment before asking, "Does this mean I don't have to make pancakes?"

"No, don't be silly," Nora scoffed, "Of course we'll still have pancakes. But this way, we'll have coffee to go along with them! I mean, assuming he passes."

"What happens if I don't?" Jaune asked.

Nora smiled and slapped the edge of the frying pan against her palm, the squeezed. She left four finger-shaped imprints in the cast iron.

Jaune wisely decided to change tracks and asked instead, "I mean, uh, where do I get this...soup...duped...coffee?"

"The super-duper-whooper coffee," Ruby said with a soft edge of awe in her voice, "It only comes from the special coffee machine hidden in the deepest recesses of the teacher's lounge! Students aren't allowed to drink it. It's too powerful. Too dangerous. I heard that one of the upperclassman took a single sip, and he had to be hospitalized for an entire year. But if you can survive drinking an entire cup, it can grant you incredible powers. It's what gives Professor Oobleck the power to _bend time_. And psychically find out exactly who hasn't done the reading!"

"Or, more likely, it's because he drinks his coffee out of his weapon thermos and who knows what kind of cross-contamination is going on in there," said Yang, "But I did hear from an upperclassman that it's crazy good stuff. Better than any of that swill they serve us at breakfast. Our professors are just jerks who don't like to share."

Jaune took a moment to process everything he had been told.

"So, let me get this straight," he said, then gestured towards Nora, "You're sending me to steal coffee from the teacher's lounge to...judge whether or not I deserve to be on your team?"

"You got it!" Nora nodded enthusiastically.

Jaune sent a pleading glance towards Ren, who at least seemed mostly sane. Unfortunately, the other boy just gave him a slight shrug, as if this was a situation that had played out too many times before, and the other boy had long since made peace with the insanity that surrounded him and settled into an apathetic zen-like state. Which, unfortunately, left Jaune with no other choice, given that he quite liked his legs and would prefer to keep them intact.

Wearily, in a tone that suggested resignation to whatever horrible fate awaited him, Jaune Arc groaned, "Which way was the teacher's lounge again?"

. . .

We now return to the point in time where Pyrrha Nikos, making a tactical retreat, passes underneath an exploding window.

At the same point in time, a hapless body belonging to Jaune Arc moving in the perfect parabola of a free-falling projectile, which carried him through the window in question.

' _Where did it all go so wrong?_ ' Jaune wondered as he corkscrewed through the air, ears ringing from the explosion that had sent him crashing through a fourth-story window.

Honestly, it probably wouldn't have gone so badly if he had just gone in alone, and considering how things tended to go whenever Jaune Arc went at them alone, the most recent fiasco had gone very badly indeed.

Ruby, ever helpful, had offered to show him to the teacher's lounge. Yang, the clearly less altruistically inclined sibling, had decided to tag along partly to avoid the catfight going on between their other two teammates and partly for the entertainment value.

The true spanner in the works, however, came in the form of Nora Valkyrie, who, upon realizing that it would take Ren another thirty minutes to produce the mind-boggling number of pancakes she demanded, decided she might as well use that time to observe Jaune's competence in the field. A task which, apparently, required bringing along the terrifying warhammer-cum-grenade-launcher that she fondly referred to as 'Maggie'.

The original plan had been to sneak in while the professors were elsewhere, fill a couple thermoses, and then sneak back out. It was not the most brilliant plan in the history of ingenious plans, but even in the case of abject failure, it should not have resulted in involuntary defenestration.

Unfortunately, Jaune had a talent for fooling foolproof plans, even if he wasn't the fool in question.

The coffee machine was not, as Jaune expected, one of those normal household coffee makers that were space efficient and easy to clean, because gods forbid anything at this school have any semblance of sanity.

Instead, it was one of those newfangled coffee dispensers with more options and buttons than any coffee machine should reasonably ever need. He couldn't even figure out where he was supposed to pour in the water, never mind how to make it brew a straight cup of coffee without any of the fancy additional flavors. As someone who had personally made coffee for Death itself every morning for the last four years, Jaune felt personally offended by the overcomplicated contraption.

His housework skills were flawless. Clearly, the machine was the problem in this equation.

In the end, however, hard-won experience triumphed over poorly thought out and overly convoluted design, and the machine grumbled obediently as it began discharging its contents into the first cheerful pink thermos.

Jaune's fatal mistake was that he was too busy keeping a suspicious eye on the machine that he didn't realize that he had handed the filled thermoses to Nora. He also missed the sounds of someone gulping down unwise quantities of extremely strong coffee behind him. In fact, he didn't notice at all until he finished filling a fourth thermos, only to realize in confusion that they had only brought two thermoses with them.

It turned out, Nora had emptied each filled thermos he handed her, then handed the empty thermos right back to him. Her smile had been unnervingly bright, and a worrying, spasmodic twitch had set into her right eye. His first warning should have been the fact that Yang and Ruby had already retreated a safe distance away, and were taking cover behind various pieces of furniture.

In keeping with the way his life in general tended to go, a stern-looking blonde woman who was clearly part of the faculty had chosen that exact moment to stride into the room.

Jaune had been caught frozen with a half-filled thermos in one hand, and the thumb of his other hand still pressing down on the 'Dispense' button. There was a brief moment of complete silence, save for the smug, mocking burble of the machine as it continued to discharge the incriminating brown substance into Jaune's possession.

The blonde professor had frowned in an ominous way that implied she was about to issue a scathing lecture that would make you regret every life decision you had made up until this point. She parted her lips, no doubt about to pronounce some terrible judgment upon them -

Then the over-caffeinated Nora had screeched "SCATTER!" and smashed 'Maggie' the warhammer-cum-grenade-launcher into the floor.

Jaune didn't even have a chance to scream before he was blasted off his feet by a shockingly pink explosion. He did, however, have an excellent view of the window he was blasted through, and even took a moment to admire the neat shape of his own silhouette that his body had left in the glass. It was a brief moment, because his brain finally caught up with him through the haze of pain and informed him that he was falling from an unsafe height at an unsafe and had an unsafe landing strategy.

Said strategy could be summed up in one word: splat.

' _The ground sure is coming awfully up fast.'_ Jaune thought morosely to himself. ' _Maybe it'll be over so fast that it won't hurt. Oh, who am I kidding. This is probably going to hurt a lot._ '

He screwed his eyes tightly shut and prepared to be splattered into ludicrous gibs all across the courtyard of his new school.

Instead of meeting the unforgiving embrace of the hard, cold flagstones, however, he found himself crashing into the not quite as hard nor as unforgiving embrace of someone's arms. Which, considering that whoever had caught him was wearing armor, still hurt about as much as tripping face-first into a wall.

"I'm sorry!" A distinctly feminine voice cried out as he made a cry of protest at having his face smashed against the unbending steel of a metal bodice. There was a confusing tumble - as his unexpected savior was forced to roll backwards several times then skid with one knee against the ground to compensate for all of his incoming momentum - but when the dust settled, Jaune found himself being pressed against a set of curves. A set of unmistakably feminine curves.

"...it's...fine," he eked out despite having all the wind knocked out of him just moments prior. Somehow, this didn't seem like quite the right thing to say to someone who had just saved his life, but Jaune felt he deserved some slack regarding social graces right now, given how his brain had just served as an unwilling crash test dummy for the vehicle of his skull.

His savior blinked down at him a few times. She recognized him before he recognized her, despite the fact that she really ought to have been much easier to identify. This was most likely because she had the dubious advantage of spending the afternoon searching through thousands upon thousands of tourists for his particular combination of tall, blonde, and scraggly, as well as the advantage of not being blasted through a window five seconds prior.

"Jaune...Arc?" she asked hesitantly, not quite believing that the person she had been waiting for had literally fallen out of the sky and into her arms.

He looked up at up at her. Her head was blocking the setting sun, which had a rather pretty effect of outlining her face in a majestic halo of golden light, but it also made her features rather hard to make out without squinting. He could barely make out a red ponytail and a golden circlet against the solar glare.

Jaune hazarded a guess, "...Pyrrha Nikos?"

There was a moment of awkward silence as mutual recognition settled in like an uninvited guest at a dinner party.

Then Jaune cleared his throat and said, "Thanks for, ah, catching me."

Pyrrha, on the other hand, had a few moments to reconcile the jarringly incongruous claims on Jaune's transcripts with the sheepishly grateful young man in her arms. She stared for a few moments before remembering that it was rude to do so without saying anything.

"You're welcome," she said, and inwardly lamented that she couldn't think of anything more interesting or witty to say.

This led to another painful lull in conversation.

Jaune coughed again and said, "So. Not that I mind or anything, but are you planning to put me down anytime soon?"

"Oh, of course! Sorry." She hastily set him back on his feet. He teetered dangerously, but somehow managed to keep his knees locked in place long enough to remained upright. Then he pat himself down, shaking off the stray bits of pink dust and shattered glass that he had picked up during his express route from the fourth story to the courtyard.

Then he turned towards her and said, "I swear this isn't how I usually introduce myself. I mean, I'm bad at first impressions, but not _this_ bad. Can we, maybe, just start over?"

Pyrrha privately thought he had made a perfectly serviceable first impression - it's not like she'd hold his surprise defenestration against him, given how often Beacon students found themselves launched through all sorts of building structures - but she nodded all the same.

He immediately looked immensely relieved.

"In that case, the name's Jaune Arc. But you already knew that. Nice to meet you, and, uh, sorry I'm late."

"Pyrrha Nikos," she replied. It was a novel feeling, introducing herself by name. She added, "It's nice to meet you too" and found to her surprise that she meant it. He was far less offensive than whatever she had been expecting. In fact, she felt kind of bad for expecting the worst of him.

All in all, he seemed very normal, and normalcy was something that Pyrrha valued very much.

"So..." Jaune extended a hand towards her and asked hesitantly, "Partners?"

Pyrrha hesitated for only a moment before accepting it. His hand, she found, was just as worn and rough as her own. Funnily enough, combat training and rigorous housework both left calluses in mostly the same places.

"I suppose we are," Pyrrha said softly, and he grinned so sincerely when she shook his hand that she couldn't help but smile back.

Somewhere, somewhen, a Lady smiled and added a few more dice to the pool.

Somewhere else, somewhen else, a certain Wheel began to turn.

. . .


	6. Chapter 07

**AUTHOR'S NOTE** : (12/9/2017) Old chapter, posted before the current chapters two, three, and four. If you've already read this, the new update you're looking for is chapter four.

. . .

 ** _Chapter Seven_**

 _In Which Incompetent Assassins Look Like Theater Rejects_

. . .

"Trespassing. Theft. Destruction of school property," snapped Glynda Goodwitch, glowering at him from across the table, "All in all, not a good start to your career here, Mister Arc."

Jaune shrank down into his chair, valiantly trying to become one with the woodwork. Goodwitch was quickly cementing her position as the one of the most terrifying women Jaune was acquainted with. This was quite a notable accomplishment, considering the fact that he had seven sisters who had solemnly upheld the ancient duties of sisterhood and instilled a very healthy respect for the fairer sex into their only brother.

"If it were up to me, you would be serving detention for the rest of the semester."

Jaune shrank down even further. The chair callously refused to swallow him on the spot.

"However."

Goodwitch pursed her lips, looking displeased.

"This time, the headmaster interceded on your behalf." Jaune nearly relaxed, but Goodwitch smacked her riding crop against her palm hard enough to make him jump. "Do _not_ expect such lenience again. Is that clear?"

Jaune nodded and chirruped, "As crystal."

"Then I think it's safe to say Mister Arc has learned his lesson," came an amused, more soft-spoken voice from behind the stern professor. She let out a somewhat resigned huff and stepped to one side, half turning to face the man who had just entered the room. Something unspoken seemed to pass between them before Goodwitch gave Ozpin a rather terse nod and strode past him out of the room.

The headmaster proceeded to draw up a chair and took a seat across from Jaune. Then he placed a rather handsome wooden box on the table between them and unfolded it to reveal a chessboard with the pieces nestled neatly in foam placeholders inside.

"Do you play?" Ozpin asked casually as he began to set up the board.

"Not really," Jaune said sheepishly. He had played once, a long time ago, when one of his sisters was on a bit of a board game craze. "I don't remember how the, uh, the horse-shaped ones move."

"Those would be knights. They move two spaces in any direction, then one space to the side," Ozpin explained patiently. He finished setting up the board, turned it so that the black pieces were on Jaune's side, and then moved the white hors-er, _knight_ over the row of white pawns. "If you wouldn't mind indulging me as we talk, I find it makes conversations like these less dull."

Jaune gawked at the board, then at the man sitting on the other side of it. He honestly had no idea where to even start. Did headmasters usually pressgang students into impromptu chess matches, or was it just him?

The headmaster waved his hands in an encouraging manner and said, "Just do whatever you think is best. There are no stakes this time, Mister Arc."

Well, might as well move his own knight before he forgot which way it moved then. Jaune picked up his piece and moved it over his own row of black pawns, leaving the two sides of the board mirrors of each other once again.

"Do you know why we place our students into teams of four?" the headmaster asked, answering Jaune's move by shifting one of the white pawns forward two spaces.

Jaune hesitantly pushed a black pawn forward to flank his knight. "Er, because," he said, struggling to juggle both the conversation and the game. "Tradition?"

Ozpin let out a soft laugh and moved his other white knight forward as well. He said, "You're not altogether wrong, but I'm afraid there's more to it than that."

Clack. Clack. They each moved another piece.

"You see, a huntsman team is more than just a collection of individuals," Ozpin continued, "They are meant to work as one unit, the whole greater than the sum of its parts."

"That makes sense," Jaune said, eyeing his side of the board before swapping his king and his rook. That was a valid move, right? He remembered his sister had done that once. He glanced up at Ozpin, who just calmly moved another piece in response, so Jaune supposed it valid after all. He picked up another pawn.

Only to nearly fumble it when Ozpin said, "It is also so that we do not have to face Death alone. To be a huntsman is to engage a constant game of wits and skill against Death. In a one-on-one match, Death is far more likely to win."

Jaune swallowed. The headmaster was only speaking in metaphor, but the conversation had taken a sudden turn down a rather uncomfortable avenue. He wasn't sure how to feel about his mentor being painted in such an adversarial light. Sure, Death grumbled about all the extra paperwork caused by huntsman who died before they were scheduled to, but it wasn't like his mentor actively wished them ill. People got themselves killed; Death was just the clean-up service.

But of course, Professor Ozpin couldn't possibly know that, so Jaune said instead, "...sorry, but, why are you telling me this, Professor?"

"Because you are faced with a unique challenge," Ozpin answered, "Beacon does not often accept transfer students. Teams, once formed, rarely change members. The more romantic among us believe that some kind of divine providence - destiny, if you want to call it that - guides the formation of a huntsman team. Who are we mere mortals to say we know better?"

Jaune frowned, partly because he didn't quite understand what the headmaster was getting at, and partly because the chessboard was beginning to get distressingly convoluted. Ozpin's moves came nearly on right top of his, giving him no time to think. Never mind any overarching strategy, Jaune was really just moving whichever piece caught his eye at this point.

"But, wouldn't it be obvious that some teammates balance each other out better than others? What if one of them, uh, really isn't cut out to be a huntsman at all?"

' _Like me,_ ' Jaune added in the privacy of his own thoughts.

"That is precisely what partners and teammates are for," Ozpin said, "to cover each other's weaknesses, so that their strengths can shine all the brighter."

"That doesn't sound very fair," Jaune said in a small voice, thinking of Pyrrha. She didn't seem to have very many weaknesses at all. Certainly not any weaknesses that Jaune would be capable of covering. Then again, he had enough weaknesses for the both of them. Maybe it was a good thing he was only a fake student who'd be out of here as soon as he found the Maiden. They were already willing to replace her partner once; maybe the next replacement would be the kind of guy she deserved.

Instead of answering, Ozpin slid his bishop forward and captured the black queen. Jaune inwardly winced, but took the other white bishop in return. Not exactly a fair trade, but hey, the fact that he was even keeping up this well was honestly quite a surprise to the blonde apprentice.

Then, seemingly out of the blue, Ozpin asked, "Do you hold your family accountable to debts they owe you? Or yours owed to them? Must every favor be repaid and every slight returned in kind?"

"What?" Jaune blinked, caught completely off guard, "No! I mean, I'm really thankful to my parents, and I want to make them proud, but...that's...not how family works. They're _family_."

Something tense seemed to ease behind the headmaster's eyes, and he affected a faint smile as he said, "A team is no different. Merely a family of a different kind. That is the ideal, at least, even if it does not always works out that way. It is also the reason you are here now - to heal a team that has fractured."

"Oh. That's...cool," Jaune said weakly, feeling even more like scum than before. Pretending to be a teammate was bad enough, but pretending to be family? Way, way worse. "I'll be sure to do that. Heh."

"I have complete faith in your abilities," the headmaster said.

' _That_ _makes_ _one_ _of_ _us_ ,' Jaune thought morosely.

"Which is why I am making you the leader of team JNPR," Ozpin continued, and this time, Jaune did drop one of his pieces.

The sad little black pawn bounced and rolled off the edge of the table onto the floor as Jaune screeched, "What?!"

Ozpin, unmoved by the outburst, simply reached down and retrieved the wayward pawn, placing it back on the board in its old position. He said calmly, "The dissolution of team PRWN was due to my mistake in appointing Miss Nikos as leader. I had hoped that her strength would help reign in Mister Winchester's less...admirable qualities. Now, I see that I failed in grasping the core of both of their characters."

More pieces shifted around the chessboard.

"All of the remaining members of your team are exceptional individuals," Ozpin continued, "but they lack qualities that you possess in abundance. That is why only you can bring them together. To become an extraordinary team rather than a collection of wasted potential. Your team already has skill and strength in abundance. But you, Mister Arc, must be the heart that gives it life."

The irony of that particular choice of words was not lost upon Jaune.

He hadn't signed up for any of this. Feeling like a complete fraud, Jaune croaked, "I'll...do my best."

The headmaster nodded.

"That is all I ask," the man said, then reached over and tipped the white king over. "You are free to return to them, Mister Arc." Then he stood and exited the way he came, leaving Jaune staring in bewilderment at the chessboard in front of him.

Had he...how in the world...what exactly just happened?

White was in checkmate.

Jaune had...won?

. . .

For perhaps the first time in his life, Jaune was thankful for his less than stellar sense of direction, because the longer he spent meandering in down all the wrong hallways searching for his room, the longer he could put off the inevitable conversation with the rest of the newly christened team JNPR. J-N-P-R, starting with 'J' as in 'Jaune', because some incomprehensible sequence of events had put him in charge of three people who could flatten him in a straight fight without even breaking a sweat.

Unfortunately, there were only so many identical hallways you could go down before you inevitably went down the right one, and Jaune found himself staring up at room 042 no more prepared to face his new teammates than he was fifteen minutes ago.

"This is it. Just play it cool. Say it like it's no big deal, and then distract them by changing the subject," Jaune said to himself. "You're a leader, even if...even if it's just pretend. You can do this!"

Pep talk complete, he opened the door and a orange-haired girl clad only in a towel dashed across the room with an entire pancake dangling from her mouth.

Jaune closed the door again. He stared up at the room numbers to make sure he hadn't read them wrong. '042' stared balefully back down at him.

"Okay, clearly, you were nervous and seeing things," Jaune told himself, and tried opening the door again, only for it to slam open on its own accord. " _Gah_!"

"Jaune! You're back! See, Ren, I told you he'd be okay. Goodwitch wasn't even that mad this time. She only yelled at us a little," Nora Valkyrie said, her words muffled by a mouthful of half-eaten pancake. She stood far too close for comfort, because with an entire foot of height difference between them, Jaune could almost see straight down the front of her towel. Granted, this wasn't the first time he had seen a girl in a towel, but strangely enough, his sisters had never managed to quite inspire the same feelings of simultaneous heart attack and strangulation.

"Ghrk," said Jaune.

"Nora," came Ren's familiar, weary-sounding voice, "Don't open the door in a towel."

"Whatever you say, Ren," Nora said, throwing a mock salute and bounding off towards the closet while Jaune continued quietly choking in the doorway.

"It's good to see you again, Jaune," came Pyrrha's polite greeting from where the red-haired girl sat modestly at her desk with several notebooks spread in front of her. "I'm sorry you got in trouble with Goodwitch on your first day."

With herculean effort, Jaune snapped out of the stupor of a seventeen-year-old boy facing the terrifying reality of living in co-ed dorms. It took a few swallows and an awkward clearing of his throat before his voice was in working order again.

When he could form words again, he said, "It's, eh, it's not like it was your fault. I got myself into that mess. Besides, all I got was a lecture, so no harm, no foul, right?" He offered her a lopsided smile of reassurance.

Pyrrha returned it with a small smile of her own.

Then Nora was bounding back out of the closet, clad more reasonable in a t-shirt and shorts as she asked, "Did they tell you what our new team name is? Ren thinks it's going to be P-R-J-N for Persian, but P-R-N-J for Pumpkin-Orange is sounds so much cooler."

"Er," Jaune stalled, already feeling the cold sweat beading on his brow. He had hoped to put this off for at least a little longer.

But all three of his teammates were staring at him with mild curiosity now, and he couldn't see a way out without outright lying to them, which was an option he had seriously considered before remembering that he was about as skilled at deception as he was at underwater basket weaving. Which was not at all.

Resigned, he finally confessed, "...it's J-N-P-R. For Juniper."

There was a beat of surprised silence before Pyrrha let out a surprised, "Oh! That means - "

"- you're the leader now!" Nora finished.

Ren contributed a mute nod.

"...yes?" Jaune ventured cautiously. His teammates looked surprisingly not-angry.

"That's good to hear," Pyrrha said, shooting her other two teammates a fleeting apologetic look before adding, "It's a bit of a relief, actually. I wasn't exactly the best leader."

"That's silly, you were a great leader, Pyrrha!" Nora was quick to reassure her, "Cardin was just a bad teammate. We should have just broken his legs from the start."

"At any rate, this is a good thing. We're a new team now, with a new leader, so it's like a clean slate," Pyrrha said, diplomatically choosing to turn aside the mention of their rather controversial ex-teammate.

Jaune asked, "So...you're all...okay with this?"

Pyrrha smiled warmly and said, "I'm sure you'll prove yourself to all of us in time."

Nora said, "Just think of all the new things we can come up with for the tournament now that we're jerk-free!"

Ren contributed another mute nod, but there was a warmth to his silence that wasn't there before.

"You guys, I-I don't know what to say. I really don't deserve it but...thanks," Jaune said, feeling a knot that was equal parts guilt and gratitude well up in his throat.

These people, they were the kind of people he had dreamed of being like once upon a time. Huntsmen-in-training, heroes-to-be, people who had signed up to spend their entire lives fighting against humanity's ancient foe to keep the innocent safe. As Beacon students, they were the best of the best, prodigies without exception, and yet, these people were willing to give him a chance. Him, Jaune Arc, who had never done a thing right in his life. It was a strange feeling, like a helium balloon swelling up in his chest at the same time a leaden weight squeezed down on his heart.

He was so touched that he found the words spilling out of his lips before he could stop them.

"I swear I won't let you guys down."

Jaune froze as soon as he said them, but it was already too late to take them back. Nora beamed and clapped him on the back hard enough to knock all the wind out of him, the tips of Pyrrha's ears turned pink as she smiled and looked away, and even stoic Ren's lips twitched upwards a little as the other boy gave a small incline of his head in acknowledgement.

Jaune forced a smile too and tried not to throw up on the spot.

' _Nice going, self. It's not like you can't fight your way out of a wet paper bag or anything. I'm sure you'll do just fine, leading a team when you've never led so much as a tea party,_ ' Jaune thought, ' _What was it that Dad always said? An Arc never goes back on his word? Hahahaha, aaaaaaah, I am so screwed._ '

Somewhere else, somewhen else, a certain Lady added a few more dice to the pool and a certain Wheel ground forward just a little more.

. . .

The slumber of the doomed was rarely peaceful, and Jaune found himself tossing and turning long into the wee hours of the morning. It didn't help that this was the first time he had slept in a room with other people since he left home for his apprenticeship, nor that Nora apparently mumbled in her sleep about pancakes, and especially not that Ren's dark hair splayed against a white pillowcase in the faint moonlight was weirdly pretty and making Jaune question things about himself that he had never questioned before.

But in the end, sheer exhaustion finally won out, and Jaune settled into fitful, but surprisingly pleasant dreams.

Someone was running their hands lovingly through his scraggly blonde hair. It was a rather nice feeling - soft, feminine fingers stroking gently along his scalp - but also oddly familiar. Unnervingly familiar. A sense of vague dread that only increased as warm lips nibbled along the lobes of his ear and hot, heavy breaths tickled the nape of his neck.

Then, without any warning, the gentle hands grabbed a fistful of his hair and yanked _hard_ , nearly tearing out a piece of his scalp along with it.

That snapped Jaune out of his half-dreaming state and into harsh wakefulness with a pained yelp and a hard thump as he flailed out of bed and onto the floor.

"Ow, what the - ?!" Rubbing the offended patch of scalp, Jaune cracked open an eye and cranked his neck upwards, only to be greeted by the underside of a horse. A very familiar horse, chewing on a few strands of hair in a familiar shade of blonde, with the reality of this exact situation made even more familiar by the all too familiar sensation of slobber-drenched bangs sliding slowly down his forehead.

On cue, his scroll began to vibrate to the slow, mournful notes of a funeral march. Jaune let his head fall into his hands with a pained groan. With Milly's surprise arrival in his room, there was really only one person the caller could be.

With the dread of a man literally greeting his own death, Jaune hit the 'answer' button. He kept his voice at a low hiss in order to avoid waking his roommates.

"Couldn't this have waited until normal people wake up? In case you forgot, the rest of us fleshy mortals need this little thing called sleep to stay alive."

IS THAT AN OFFER TO ALTER YOUR LIVING STATUS IN ORDER TO RAISE YOUR WORK EFFICIENCY? the unmistakable, hollow voice echoed in his head rather than emanating from the scroll like a normal phone conversation.

"Actually, you know what," Jaune backpedaled hastily, "This is fine, totally a great time to call. What's up?"

HOW GOES YOUR SEARCH FOR THE MAIDEN?

Jaune winced and said, "Oh, that. It's, uh, it's going. You know, the description of 'young, beautiful, and capable of wielding powers beyond the mortal ken' would be a lot more helpful if it didn't describe literally _every single_ female classmate I've run across at this school."

SHE ALSO HAS A FONDNESS FOR APPLES. AND CHILDREN. ALBEIT NOT FOR THE SAME PURPOSES.

"Thank you. That'll really help narrow it down," Jaune said, resigning himself to the unenviable fate of offering apples to random girls and asking if they liked kids, because that wouldn't be weird or creepy at all. "Or you could just tell me who it is."

I WILL CONSIDER IT. There was a pause. Jaune didn't even bother to let hope swell in his heart; his inner hope balloon had been punctured too many times to hold any hot air whatsoever. Sure enough, after a few moments, Death replied, I HAVE CONSIDERED IT. THE ANSWER IS NO.

Jaune pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed, "Yeah, I figured. So, is that all? Can I get back to sleep now?"

IT SEEMS YOUR TASK WILL TAKE A CONSIDERABLE AMOUNT OF TIME. SINCE YOU ARE NO LONGER PERFORMING THE USUAL DUTIES I PAY YOU FOR, YOU MIGHT AS WELL BE PRODUCTIVE IN OTHER WAYS.

"Wait, I get _paid_?"

Death ignored that entirely and said, THERE IS AN ERRAND IN VALE YOU CAN RUN, SINCE YOU ARE ALREADY IN THE AREA.

"I'm not going to like this, am I?"

MILLY WILL SHOW YOU THE WAY.

The line clicked and disconnected before Jaune could get another word in edgewise. It left him staring down at the screen of his scroll, where a rather ominous looking hourglass had popped up with a digital display overlaid on top of it. The numbers were very clearly counting down. Eleven seconds. Ten. Nine. Eight.

Jaune looked up at Milly, then down at his Pumpkin Pete footsie pajamas, then back up at Milly.

"Aw, c'mon, can't I at least get ch-"

There was a whinny, a flash of silent lightning, and then the room contained one less hapless blonde apprentice than it did before.

. . .

When you had lived as long as Old Gerson, you noticed that lots of things didn't work as well as they used to.

Money used to work properly, for instance. You could get a whole loaf of bread for a few Lien. Now, the damn cards weren't worth the plastic they were printed on. Took a whole stack just to buy the same things they used to. Damn inefficient, that's what it was. Whichever darned bigwig that had come up with this newfangled 'inflation' idea oughta be force fed all those 1-lien cards that weren't good for anything anymore except pelting those annoying young door-to-door salesmen who refused to take a hint.

Honestly, they didn't make young people the way they used to either. Always racing about, making much ado about nothing. Why, when he was young, he had actually gone out and done things. Important things. Things he couldn't remember clearly half of the time, but he was sure they had been important. Now though? All these young people seemed to have nothing to do with their lives except pester folks about buying useless things like coupon books and life insurance. As if lien wasn't worthless enough, and the only guarantee in life was a visit from the ol' Reaper at the end of it.

Hell, even the young 'uns that _did_ decide to go out and do things went about it all wrong. The only visitors worse than those door-to-door salesmen were those poor, deluded White Fang hatchlings. Saying things like how they were at war, and it was their solemn duty to join the cause, hah! Gerson knew damn well what a proper war looked like.

He'd fought two of 'em, after all. Back in his day, you strapped your momma's best pot onto your heads, grabbed the nearest hatchet or pickaxe, and set off to fight under the King's banner for freedom and justice and all those kinds of important things that young people were supposed to care about. You followed your commander through dunes and sandstorms, uphill _both ways_ , and started bashing people with pointy sticks until the one side cried uncle.

Now it was all picket lines and blowing up trains and robbing poor, upstanding shopkeepers. Utterly disgraceful, that's what it was - just a bunch of overgrown hatchlings throwing a tantrum. Couldn't talk sense into any of 'em.

Well, there was only one way to get through to hard-headed youngsters like them, and that was to make 'em learn lessons the hard way. If it took ratting out a couple faces he recognized to the coppers, or helping the rare hatchling who actually came back to their senses climb outta the hole they dug themselves into, then that's just how it had to be.

Course, trying to teach discipline to a gaggle of hotheads in full blown self-righteous rebellion was bound to end in some kind of overdramatic backlash sooner or later. Gerson wasn't even surprised when he woke up in the middle of the night to a hooded, dark figure towering over his bedside.

"You were warned. The Fang does not suffer traitors," said the hooded figure in a stereotypically low, raspy voice, shot him in the chest, and then disappeared out the window in a dramatic swirl of ten-lien stage costume cape.

' _They don't even make assassins like they used to_ ,' Gerson thought crankily to himself as the dust bullet settled into its new home between his ribs. A proper assassin wouldn't be caught dead in such an embarrassingly cliché getup. You could always tell who was a proper professional and who was an overblown grunt with delusions of grandeur - the latter looked like Spruce Willis villains with equally bad one-liners, while the former looked like world-weary janitors right up until they put a roll of poisoned toilet paper into your favorite stall right before you had to answer the call of nature.

He had half a mind to live through the horribly incompetent assassination just on principle. That'll teach 'em not to run off half-cocked instead of finishing a job properly. He contemplated it for a moment before deciding that it was more trouble than it was worth. Damn kids made it clear they weren't interested in learning anything he had to teach, anyhow.

Might as well check out before the crummy place burned down around his ears. The new generation could clean up their own damned mess for once. Might even teach them a thing or two.

So Old Gerson rearranged his pillows, settled down into a more comfortable position to ease the strain on his aching back, closed his eyes, and waited.

Then he waited some more. The hole in his chest bled sluggishly, but other than that, nothing else changed.

He cracked open an eye.

Still nothing.

Gerson was about to get back out of bed and see what the hold-up was when there was finally a flash of lightning and a scrawny young man in the most ridiculous footsie pajamas appeared in mid-air.

"-anged?" the boy yelped before gravity reasserted its iron grip and smacked him down on hardwood floor, rump first. He looked rather green around the gills and laid still for a few moments, trying not to heave, before muttering, "Ugh...I'll take that as a no."

Rather unimpressed by this deviation from the norm, Gerson said disapprovingly, "You're late."

Then he died.

"It's not like I had a whole lot of advance notice," the young man protested, before noticing that there was no longer anyone around to hear it. He picked himself off the ground and stood awkwardly at the bedside for a moment before smacking himself on the forehead. "Dammit, I didn't even bring the..."

He trailed off because the small training scythe he hadn't had time to grab was somehow in his non-forehead-smacking hand, as if it had always been there, because there was no such thing as Death not having enough time for a reaping and the universe had corrected the oversight retroactively.

Resolving not to think too hard about things that would break his brain, the young man unfolded the weapon and stood over Gerson's cooling corpse for a moment, looking rather ill in the cold blue light glinting off the modest ten-inch blade.

"I guess I'll just," he said as he made a half-hearted swing in Gerson's general direction. The scythe passed through Gerson's torso before getting stuck somewhere between the fourth and fifth rib. The young man frowned and gave the handle a tug, to no avail. Then he sighed, wrapped both hands around the handle, and braced himself as he yanked backwards with all the strength in his gangly frame.

The soul of Gerson ripped out of the body with the sound of a champagne cork popping, and the young man tumbled back onto the hardwood floor for the second time in as many minutes.

The soul of Gerson bore the same disapproving expression as the its body had died with.

 _"I suppose that's that then,_ " it echoed, before fixing the young man with a rather skeptical look. " _You don't look much like a proper Death._ "

"Proper Death was busy," said the young man.

The soul of Gerson crossed its soul arms and said, " _But you couldn't even bother to dress the part, could you? Back in my day, appearances actually meant something. Professionalism. Dignity. Self-respect._ "

"Look," said the young man tiredly, "I'm sorry about all this, but I'm not really in charge of how these things work. If you want, I'll pass on your complaints, and hopefully neither of us have to do this again."

" _Figures,_ " the soul of Gerson huffed, " _An entire century of waiting, and then you get stuck with an intern instead of getting proper service._ " The outline of the soul began to grow fuzzy as bits of it broke off into motes of light that dissolved into nothingness.

" _No respect at all. Why, back in my day..._ " its voice faded into nothingness as it finally passed on to whatever afterlife was waiting for it.

The young man watched until the last motes of light disappeared, and then sagged heavily in relief. He folded up his small hand scythe, which had rather completely lost its cold blue glow, before looking around the room with his bright blue eyes.

"Er, Milly?" he called out hopefully.

Nothing happened.

"Milly?" he called out again, walking across the room and carefully skirting around Gerson's corpse to look out of the half-open window towards the empty street outside. He could see bright shattered moon above, a flickering streetlight on the corner, and in the far distance, the faint twinkle of the Beacon CCT tower from the top of the towering cliff that overlooked Vale.

There was no hide nor hoof belonging to a familiar pale horse anywhere to be seen.

He looked again at the distantly twinkling lights of Beacon Academy.

"Oh, you have _got_ to be kidding me."

. . .

Death was omnipresent. It didn't really need to _go_ anywhere; it was simply _there_. The horse, really, was just for tradition's sake.

Unfortunately, Jaune had never quite gotten the hang of simply _being_ somewhere without actually having to travel there, since, the last time he checked, he was still a fleshy mortal, and fleshy mortals were typically unable to be in multiple places at once. It resulted in spending several uncomfortable moments stuck in a room with a rather clearly murdered corpse, now that he had time to notice the growing bloodstain, before he mustered up enough concentration to pull off a rather poor imitation of his mentor's ability.

It involved trying to convince the universe that Jaune Arc couldn't possibly be inside a stranger's locked house on the other side of Vale when he had clearly been safely tucked away in his bed mere minutes before. Since there was no possible way he could be here, he wouldn't be.

He scrunched his eyes shut and stepped forward, hoping to reopen them and see his dorm room.

Unfortunately, while there was no possible way for Jaune Arc to be in a stranger's locked house, there _were_ plenty of places other than his dorm room that he could have been, and he found himself sequentially shunted through a dizzying montage of a strange vault lit with green torches, the inside of a locker, the top of a rooftop, a terrifying forest full of Grimm, and then randomly five-hundred feet in the air and falling before he finally appeared in the familiar hallway outside his room.

He promptly rushed to the nearest trashcan and dry heaved. Fleshy mortals were _definitely_ not meant to be in more than one place at once.

UGH, he groaned, before finally unwrapping himself from the wastebasket and stumbling towards the door to his room.

He pulled out his scroll to unlock the door, and found that its battery had died. Either Death's life-timer app was very energy intensive, or travelling through multiple possible locations in a single moment was hell on scroll batteries. Either way, Jaune was in the unfortunate position of being locked outside of his room.

He briefly considered simply giving up and sleeping in the hallway until Pyrrha woke up and let him back in.

No. His night had been shitty enough. He deserved a warm and soft bed to sleep in for at least the thirty-minutes he could get before dawn. A single, pesky door was not going to rob him of his well-deserved rest.

Jaune placed a hand flat against the door, and simply willed himself to pass through a time when the door had not been there. He could do this. He had gone through walls before - granted, with his mentor's help - and he could recapture that feeling. Coldness. Stillness. He was more real than the door, because the door had not always been there, whereas he would always be there. A simple locked door could not stop Death.

Jaune stepped forward confidently and promptly bashed his face against the hard, unforgivingly solid surface.

But fortunately, he bashed his head hard enough to daze himself momentarily, and managed to stumble forward a few steps while he was too dazed to remember that fleshy mortals couldn't pass through solid doors.

By the time the ringing in his skull died down, he found himself standing on the other side, and he could already see his blessedly empty bed beckoning towards him. He didn't think twice before collapsing into it and passing out.

The last thing he thought as he drifted off to sleep was, ' _Weird. My pillow smells a lot nicer than I remember._ '

. . .

He woke up to an incredibly unhappy and alarmingly feminine screech.

. . .

 _Author's Note:_

 _The chess game being played between Ozpin and Jaune is Bryne vs Fischer (1956). Part of it is a shout out to one of my favorite underappreciated American chess players, and part of it is because my inner chess geek loves making obscure references._

S _pecial thanks to CryptIXeeper for being an absolutely fantastic beta reader, without whom this chapter would be a train wreck of derpy typos and wall-of-text paragraphs, and the previous chapter would have been chock full of unfunny anime tropes (or, more full of it than it already is)._


End file.
